If you think you can average 60mph you've never driven in the northeast/California before.
I can't speak for the Northeast, but in California you should be able to average around 60 if you stick to the interstates as much as possible. California has an interstate speed limit of 70 (not as good as Montana, but better than Oregon and most of Washington). I5 even avoids the traffic snarls around SF entirely.
Hotmail et al have been silently blocking mail from my personal domain for a month or three now. It would have been nice if they'd at least bounced it, so I would have known earlier.
I'm sure it's not in the short term, but in the long term (which American businesses seem to have lost all interest in) having a solid infrastructure will give the country a stronger economy and increase profits for most corporations.
Audiophiles are the people who claim that things like $7000 speaker wire and magic "Shakti stones" placed around their stereo improve the sound, but refuse to test that theory in a scientific way.
I guess I should clarify this statement. I know there are people who call themselves "audiophiles" and are not like this - I work with one, and the gear he listens to music on is nice stuff. In my mind they are something else though, because the vast majority of people I've seen apply the "audiophile" label to themselves are the ones who I mentioned originally. I tend to think of my coworker as just "a guy who buys nice-sounding boutique audio hardware" as opposed to "an audiophile".
The strings on a guitar have a lot more to do with the sound than the wires running to your speakers do, because the source of all the sound from the guitar is the strings vibrating.
In any case, if you operate an amp beyond its rated power, the results are crap.
I think you, and at least four other people in this thread, are getting confused and talking about amplifiers like you'd use in your home stereo system, as opposed to the kind that you'd plug a guitar into.
Overdriving the signal from a guitar to one degree or another is how nearly every player with an electric guitar gets the sound they want. They aren't overdriving at the power amplification stage, it's all in the pre-amp, but those are both in "the amplifier" that they connect their guitar to.
This tube discussion is also mostly unrelated to audiophiles. No one is seriously debating that a tube amp sounds the same as a solid state amp. Audiophiles are the people who claim that things like $7000 speaker wire and magic "Shakti stones" placed around their stereo improve the sound, but refuse to test that theory in a scientific way.
The user interface is just horrendous. Every time I keep trying to use it and it just shows that despite all the best of intentions the coders on the project just have no clue whatsoever what constitutes a useful user interface.
Agreed. I have trouble even pinning down one specific aspect of it that is the problem, because so much is wrong with it. The one that always sticks in my mind is how when I create text, rather than simply creating a new layer with the text in it, the GIMP also sets that new layer to be only just big enough to hold the text, so if I've made text in the center of a larger image, the text layer has a border of null space around it. So if I try to do something like manually create a drop shadow effect, most of it will be clipped at the edges. Now that I know that this is the case, I can resize the layer to be big enough (although I wish I could just enable a checkbox where this would be the default behavior, because I would have to do it *all* of the time assuming the GIMP were my main image editor). But before then? It took me hours to figure out that that's what was happening, because I had no idea someone would ever design an image editing app that way. Also, the file dialogues are horrendous (other than being able to pick the file type to save as by typing the appropriate extension, which is clever). Maybe they work better on Linux, but on Windows they are the clunkiest things ever. Would it really be that hard to at least allow the use of the OS's own file dialogues, if not make it the default behavior? Adobe has gotten a bit sloppy about the quality of the last few revisions of Photoshop (having to delete my preferences file to make Merge To HDR work? Am I suddenly on a Macintosh running OS 8.5 in 1999 again?), so an alternative that worked solidly would be awesome.
Being able to see the source means that you can take the present tool kit and work around any bugs in a deliberate manner. Whereas without the ability to see the code you have to hope that the bug is what you think it is.
I would go one step further and say that it also lets you understand the behaviour of the framework where the documentation is inadequate or missing. I can see this being very useful, especially for those of us who like to fool about with less-commonly-used parts of.NET. I also think that in the larger view, this is a great indication of shifting mentalities at Microsoft. I was pretty surprised to read "The security of the.NET Framework does not depend on the obscurity of the.NET Framework source code" in one of their press releases.
In that case, they should make it an option that can be set either way. It's not like Notes is a bastion of clean and simplistic design that would be ruined by a few more radio buttons or a set of drop-downs to define your function key behavior.
I agree. A lot of the comments for this article are very disappointing.
One of the most interesting things I've read about Latin is regarding the future perfect tense. While it exists in English, the explanation I read of its use in Latin was that a native speaker would use it much more frequently, leading to a mentality more along the lines of future events being immutable. Even using the future perfect tense in English doesn't really have that effect.
Aside from the loss of concepts, there is of course the loss of art. Poetry, for example, tends to be mauled when it is translated - the most common way being that either the meter/rhyme is screwed up because the words are so different, or the words are changed drastically to make them fit the meter or rhyme of the new language.
It's not just going to Frys or getting them direct from the manufacturer. It's how many you buy in quantity. Companies that make CD-ROM drives buy their parts in much greater numbers than companies that make medical spectrograph gear, so they get them for much cheaper. As other people have pointed out, the DIY method is not meant as a replacement for hospitals that can afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars (or even thousands of dollars) on a single piece of gear. It's intended for people like those in third world countries where a garage-built scanner is the only option other than no scanner at all.
I imagine buying those drives for parts is probably more expensive than paying for the components they actually need out of those drives fresh and not having to convert things.
Actually, this is almost certainly not the case. Economies of scale have given us dirt cheap CD-ROM drives. You can buy several models - brand new - at e.g. New Egg for about US$12. You would probably pay about that much for just the status LED, open/close button, and motors at e.g. Frys. This project benefits additionally from the mechanism as a whole - they get the controller firmware, the mechanical bits and bobs related to holding and spinning a CD, most of the device/PC interface, etc. My dad is a mechanical engineer, and when I was a kid he once remarked on a similar subject - he had replaced his broken car stereo, and out of curiousity disassembled the old one. Inside he found a tiny planetary gear assembly, which would have been more expensive than the entire factory stereo if purchased as an individual component instead of mass-produced for Honda.
What she was wearing looks like a mini version of one of THESE
Yes, I can see how you'd think that an exposed breadboard with some LEDs on it is pretty much a dead ringer for a vest with a bunch of pipes stuffed in it. I had to look at the pictures five or six times to make sure you hadn't simply linked to another copy of the picture from TFA.
The CG rendering of a pouch was also very convincing. I often worry that TEH TERRORISTS!!! have replaced my belt pouches with C4+nail bombs because they look exactly the same. In fact, I bought one of those thick green bomb squad suits to wear when making sure that what I think are my belt pouches are in fact my belt pouches and not going to blow me into tiny bits.
Overly paranoid people like you are the reason that everything that makes the US a great country is being destroyed. I would be fine with being blown up by TEH TERRORISTS!!! tomorrow if it meant people could display LED artwork publicly in Boston or see the real deal Hoover Dam tour again instead of the castrated "look, in the distance, you can sort of see one of the generators, beneath the giant American flag!" version they have now.
Starting around Detonator version 60.xx, the PC version of Soul Reaver would no longer run on Windows XP. Reverting to the earlier Detonator versions fixed the problem. I assumed at the time that NVidia had tweaked it to improve performance in the rice-gamer benchmarks at the expense of real-world compatibility. The initial release of NVidia drivers for Vista made the game run correctly. My assumption then was that Microsoft had tightened the restrictions on compatibility with the new driver model. I haven't tried it since then to see if that's still the case. In any case, it's pretty annoying. I have a copy of System Shock 2 I've been meaning to play for some time, and there are lots of other good old games out there. I would switch to ATI, but their drivers are abysmal in my experience.
No more installers sticking stuff in your registry
Uh, that's what the registry is there for. You know, so that things can be "registered". I've never understood the craze some people seem to get into about keeping it "clean". Do you also buy DayRunners and then make absolutely sure that no one ever writes in them?
Anyway, the tape->MP3 conversion seems like a common sense idea, but a quick search didn't turn up anything.
Back in the mid-90s, before mp3s became popular, a small company did a limited run of audio CDs that contained most/all of the games for the Starpath Supercharger Atari 2600 add-on.
I just saw the Transformers cartoons at near giveaway prices at my local DVD store... I resisted exactly because I know I'd probably cringe if I saw them again.
They're actually out of print and selling for about $100/set ($500 for all three seasons) here in the US. I bought them years ago and only just now got around to watching them.
The first season is fairly weak (Dr. Smoov's Heavy Metal Fight and SOS Wheeljack are pretty much spot on), but most of seasons 2 and 3 are a big improvement. There is still definitely the 20-minute toy commercial aspect, but the writing got much better and even covers some interesting territory like religion and the manipulation of war by arms dealers.
How big is awareness of it amongst the US population in general- or even just amongst the late-twenty/early-thirtysomethings?
Voltron was very popular when I was a kid. It didn't reach Transformers levels, but I would say that it was at least as popular and well-known as Robotech in the area I grew up (near Seattle).
All these knock off really just make the "real" items kind of worthless.
So, in other words, it is making it obvious how little a brand name on a piece of clothing or personal accessory is really worth? Gosh, that's horrible.
There is also typically a lot of customization done to licensed engines by the licensees, at least according to my game dev friends. Even if the engine is more or less cross-platform out of the box, it seems unlikely that it will remain that way for long unless it's a specific goal of the developers working for the licensee. Given how many complaints I've heard about the Unreal engine in general, I'd have to imagine that with the apparent headaches of getting licensed games to run right just on Windows and the 360, only a really dedicated game developer is going to target Linux as well.
a company that has been pushing Too Human (the title in question) since 1999 (when it was being developed for the Gamecube)
A minor clarification here. That was actually the second unfinished/unreleased version of Too Human. It was originally under development for the Playstation at the same time as Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain (released in 1997). IE it has been in progress for a decade or more.
I have half-jokingly suggested before that the unfinished Playstation and Gamecube versions should be included in a collectors' edition of the 360 version as a bonus for those of us who have been waiting patiently. Unfortunately, Silicon Knights does not seem to like doing that sort of thing.
"[t]he Rio merely makes copies in order to render portable, or 'space-shift,' those files that already reside on a user's hard drive... Such copying is paradigmatic noncommercial personal use entirely consistent with the purposes of the Act."
Re:Lets create the Urban Scouts!!!
on
Explosives Camp
·
· Score: 1
No one needs to know how to tie a frickin' knot
Do you ever plan on moving things in a pickup or on a flatbed? Or go sailing or motorboating? If you're determined to stay in the city, what if you want to rappel off a building? Better carry a lot of rope since you won't be able to disconnect it once you're down and will have to use a different length every time.
A lot of the stuff I learned in my short time as a Boy Scout was less than practical in the modern world, but knots will be useful for a very long time.
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If you think you can average 60mph you've never driven in the northeast/California before.
I can't speak for the Northeast, but in California you should be able to average around 60 if you stick to the interstates as much as possible. California has an interstate speed limit of 70 (not as good as Montana, but better than Oregon and most of Washington).
I5 even avoids the traffic snarls around SF entirely.
Hotmail et al have been silently blocking mail from my personal domain for a month or three now. It would have been nice if they'd at least bounced it, so I would have known earlier.
... maybe because it's not (profitable)?!?
I'm sure it's not in the short term, but in the long term (which American businesses seem to have lost all interest in) having a solid infrastructure will give the country a stronger economy and increase profits for most corporations.
Audiophiles are the people who claim that things like $7000 speaker wire and magic "Shakti stones" placed around their stereo improve the sound, but refuse to test that theory in a scientific way.
I guess I should clarify this statement. I know there are people who call themselves "audiophiles" and are not like this - I work with one, and the gear he listens to music on is nice stuff. In my mind they are something else though, because the vast majority of people I've seen apply the "audiophile" label to themselves are the ones who I mentioned originally. I tend to think of my coworker as just "a guy who buys nice-sounding boutique audio hardware" as opposed to "an audiophile".
The strings on a guitar have a lot more to do with the sound than the wires running to your speakers do, because the source of all the sound from the guitar is the strings vibrating.
In any case, if you operate an amp beyond its rated power, the results are crap.
I think you, and at least four other people in this thread, are getting confused and talking about amplifiers like you'd use in your home stereo system, as opposed to the kind that you'd plug a guitar into.
Overdriving the signal from a guitar to one degree or another is how nearly every player with an electric guitar gets the sound they want. They aren't overdriving at the power amplification stage, it's all in the pre-amp, but those are both in "the amplifier" that they connect their guitar to.
This tube discussion is also mostly unrelated to audiophiles. No one is seriously debating that a tube amp sounds the same as a solid state amp. Audiophiles are the people who claim that things like $7000 speaker wire and magic "Shakti stones" placed around their stereo improve the sound, but refuse to test that theory in a scientific way.
The user interface is just horrendous. Every time I keep trying to use it and it just shows that despite all the best of intentions the coders on the project just have no clue whatsoever what constitutes a useful user interface.
Agreed. I have trouble even pinning down one specific aspect of it that is the problem, because so much is wrong with it.
The one that always sticks in my mind is how when I create text, rather than simply creating a new layer with the text in it, the GIMP also sets that new layer to be only just big enough to hold the text, so if I've made text in the center of a larger image, the text layer has a border of null space around it. So if I try to do something like manually create a drop shadow effect, most of it will be clipped at the edges.
Now that I know that this is the case, I can resize the layer to be big enough (although I wish I could just enable a checkbox where this would be the default behavior, because I would have to do it *all* of the time assuming the GIMP were my main image editor). But before then? It took me hours to figure out that that's what was happening, because I had no idea someone would ever design an image editing app that way.
Also, the file dialogues are horrendous (other than being able to pick the file type to save as by typing the appropriate extension, which is clever). Maybe they work better on Linux, but on Windows they are the clunkiest things ever. Would it really be that hard to at least allow the use of the OS's own file dialogues, if not make it the default behavior?
Adobe has gotten a bit sloppy about the quality of the last few revisions of Photoshop (having to delete my preferences file to make Merge To HDR work? Am I suddenly on a Macintosh running OS 8.5 in 1999 again?), so an alternative that worked solidly would be awesome.
Being able to see the source means that you can take the present tool kit and work around any bugs in a deliberate manner. Whereas without the ability to see the code you have to hope that the bug is what you think it is.
.NET. .NET Framework does not depend on the obscurity of the .NET Framework source code" in one of their press releases.
I would go one step further and say that it also lets you understand the behaviour of the framework where the documentation is inadequate or missing. I can see this being very useful, especially for those of us who like to fool about with less-commonly-used parts of
I also think that in the larger view, this is a great indication of shifting mentalities at Microsoft. I was pretty surprised to read "The security of the
In that case, they should make it an option that can be set either way. It's not like Notes is a bastion of clean and simplistic design that would be ruined by a few more radio buttons or a set of drop-downs to define your function key behavior.
I agree. A lot of the comments for this article are very disappointing.
One of the most interesting things I've read about Latin is regarding the future perfect tense. While it exists in English, the explanation I read of its use in Latin was that a native speaker would use it much more frequently, leading to a mentality more along the lines of future events being immutable. Even using the future perfect tense in English doesn't really have that effect.
Aside from the loss of concepts, there is of course the loss of art. Poetry, for example, tends to be mauled when it is translated - the most common way being that either the meter/rhyme is screwed up because the words are so different, or the words are changed drastically to make them fit the meter or rhyme of the new language.
It's not just going to Frys or getting them direct from the manufacturer. It's how many you buy in quantity. Companies that make CD-ROM drives buy their parts in much greater numbers than companies that make medical spectrograph gear, so they get them for much cheaper.
As other people have pointed out, the DIY method is not meant as a replacement for hospitals that can afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars (or even thousands of dollars) on a single piece of gear. It's intended for people like those in third world countries where a garage-built scanner is the only option other than no scanner at all.
I imagine buying those drives for parts is probably more expensive than paying for the components they actually need out of those drives fresh and not having to convert things.
Actually, this is almost certainly not the case. Economies of scale have given us dirt cheap CD-ROM drives. You can buy several models - brand new - at e.g. New Egg for about US$12. You would probably pay about that much for just the status LED, open/close button, and motors at e.g. Frys. This project benefits additionally from the mechanism as a whole - they get the controller firmware, the mechanical bits and bobs related to holding and spinning a CD, most of the device/PC interface, etc.
My dad is a mechanical engineer, and when I was a kid he once remarked on a similar subject - he had replaced his broken car stereo, and out of curiousity disassembled the old one. Inside he found a tiny planetary gear assembly, which would have been more expensive than the entire factory stereo if purchased as an individual component instead of mass-produced for Honda.
What she was wearing looks like a mini version of one of THESE
Yes, I can see how you'd think that an exposed breadboard with some LEDs on it is pretty much a dead ringer for a vest with a bunch of pipes stuffed in it. I had to look at the pictures five or six times to make sure you hadn't simply linked to another copy of the picture from TFA.
The CG rendering of a pouch was also very convincing. I often worry that TEH TERRORISTS!!! have replaced my belt pouches with C4+nail bombs because they look exactly the same. In fact, I bought one of those thick green bomb squad suits to wear when making sure that what I think are my belt pouches are in fact my belt pouches and not going to blow me into tiny bits.
Overly paranoid people like you are the reason that everything that makes the US a great country is being destroyed. I would be fine with being blown up by TEH TERRORISTS!!! tomorrow if it meant people could display LED artwork publicly in Boston or see the real deal Hoover Dam tour again instead of the castrated "look, in the distance, you can sort of see one of the generators, beneath the giant American flag!" version they have now.
Starting around Detonator version 60.xx, the PC version of Soul Reaver would no longer run on Windows XP. Reverting to the earlier Detonator versions fixed the problem. I assumed at the time that NVidia had tweaked it to improve performance in the rice-gamer benchmarks at the expense of real-world compatibility.
The initial release of NVidia drivers for Vista made the game run correctly. My assumption then was that Microsoft had tightened the restrictions on compatibility with the new driver model. I haven't tried it since then to see if that's still the case.
In any case, it's pretty annoying. I have a copy of System Shock 2 I've been meaning to play for some time, and there are lots of other good old games out there. I would switch to ATI, but their drivers are abysmal in my experience.
No more installers sticking stuff in your registry
Uh, that's what the registry is there for. You know, so that things can be "registered". I've never understood the craze some people seem to get into about keeping it "clean". Do you also buy DayRunners and then make absolutely sure that no one ever writes in them?
Anyway, the tape->MP3 conversion seems like a common sense idea, but a quick search didn't turn up anything.
Back in the mid-90s, before mp3s became popular, a small company did a limited run of audio CDs that contained most/all of the games for the Starpath Supercharger Atari 2600 add-on.
I just saw the Transformers cartoons at near giveaway prices at my local DVD store... I resisted exactly because I know I'd probably cringe if I saw them again.
They're actually out of print and selling for about $100/set ($500 for all three seasons) here in the US. I bought them years ago and only just now got around to watching them.
The first season is fairly weak (Dr. Smoov's Heavy Metal Fight and SOS Wheeljack are pretty much spot on), but most of seasons 2 and 3 are a big improvement. There is still definitely the 20-minute toy commercial aspect, but the writing got much better and even covers some interesting territory like religion and the manipulation of war by arms dealers.
How big is awareness of it amongst the US population in general- or even just amongst the late-twenty/early-thirtysomethings?
Voltron was very popular when I was a kid. It didn't reach Transformers levels, but I would say that it was at least as popular and well-known as Robotech in the area I grew up (near Seattle).
All these knock off really just make the "real" items kind of worthless.
So, in other words, it is making it obvious how little a brand name on a piece of clothing or personal accessory is really worth? Gosh, that's horrible.
I think the point here is that a little itty bitty laser diode doesn't seem intrinsically dangerous to a lot of people.
That's why I'm going to build mine into an awesome-looking laser pistol casing instead of a mini-Maglite. Problem solved!
There is also typically a lot of customization done to licensed engines by the licensees, at least according to my game dev friends. Even if the engine is more or less cross-platform out of the box, it seems unlikely that it will remain that way for long unless it's a specific goal of the developers working for the licensee.
Given how many complaints I've heard about the Unreal engine in general, I'd have to imagine that with the apparent headaches of getting licensed games to run right just on Windows and the 360, only a really dedicated game developer is going to target Linux as well.
a company that has been pushing Too Human (the title in question) since 1999 (when it was being developed for the Gamecube)
A minor clarification here. That was actually the second unfinished/unreleased version of Too Human. It was originally under development for the Playstation at the same time as Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain (released in 1997). IE it has been in progress for a decade or more.
I have half-jokingly suggested before that the unfinished Playstation and Gamecube versions should be included in a collectors' edition of the 360 version as a bonus for those of us who have been waiting patiently. Unfortunately, Silicon Knights does not seem to like doing that sort of thing.
Rich kids with too much free money to spend...
Agreed. It's in the same category of stupidity and arrogance as rock stars smashing instruments.
The cluster of "Look! We're revealing the secrets of the iPhone! By breaking it!" articles on release were equally lame in my opinion.
If you have something useful that you don't want, have the good nature to give it to someone who can make use of it.
There is a popular myth on slashdot that you have a legal right to rip music or movies that you've bought. There is no such right.
From RIAA vs. Diamond Multimedia:
"[t]he Rio merely makes copies in order to render portable, or 'space-shift,' those files that already reside on a user's hard drive... Such copying is paradigmatic noncommercial personal use entirely consistent with the purposes of the Act."
No one needs to know how to tie a frickin' knot
Do you ever plan on moving things in a pickup or on a flatbed? Or go sailing or motorboating? If you're determined to stay in the city, what if you want to rappel off a building? Better carry a lot of rope since you won't be able to disconnect it once you're down and will have to use a different length every time.
A lot of the stuff I learned in my short time as a Boy Scout was less than practical in the modern world, but knots will be useful for a very long time.