They'd do much better asking a home improvement forum, rather than a bunch of computer nerds.
Slashdot seems like a decent place to ask questions about home automation-related projects. The submitter is asking about something fairly basic, but it's still part of a wired-up home.
One step beyond what you said - spyware, Steam, etc. have pushed me away from PC gaming altogether, towards the console.
I was of the same mindset, but look at how much the Xbox360 and PS3 depend on their respective online services. How long until all of them require the same sort of online authentication as Steam even for offline play?
It's called La fin du monde which is french for The end of the world
We have that here in Seattle too.
If you're ever down here, and it happens to be the right time of year, there is a pub/brewery in the University District called The Big Time Brewery that makes a 16% alcohol barleywine that is one of the tastiest dark beers I've ever had.
As for the rain, Seattle is hardly a really rainy city. I lived in Vancouver, BC for three years and it rained at least twice as much up there. At least during those three years, days where it was raining actually outnumbered days where it wasn't.
Why would they bother creating a physical model if they're only shooting the digital set?
A *really* well-built and shot model can still look at least as convincing as a CG render, IMO. Look at the Discovery in 2001 (which was enormous), the ships in all the Alien films (even the awful Resurrection has two great-looking ships that were made to look even nicer by the lighting and film stock used), the Super Star Destroyer, etc.
CG has been used to make some neat space ships, but in my experience they don't usually hold up as well over time, as the technology advances. I'm thinking of everything from The Last Starfighter to Babylon 5 to the Star Wars prequels. For me, at least, it's because when they're released, they have a wow factor due to looking better than the last CG movie, but as soon as something better comes along, the flaws become really evident.
I've also heard (though this may not be true any more) that building a physical model is more or less the same price as building a CG model of equal detail. Of course, with a CG model you can mass-replicate them and blow up as many as you want.
Even if someone were planning on going all-CG, it might make sense to build at least parts of the model physically. Model artists have some *awesome* tricks for detailing, so they could maybe put together a couple pieces for the CG team to work from.
These days, there is still a distinction between cards issued by banks (which are tied to a bank account) and credit cards, which are often issued by a third party. My credit card, for example, is provided by Egg, with whom I do not have a current account.
It's the same in the US (actually, most of what you said is true here as well), it's just that debit cards are branded the same way as credit cards instead of having a separate system like Switch or the Canadian Interacc. For example, I have two credit cards (one Visa, one Mastercard), and one debit card (Mastercard). The credit cards are not from my bank.
I assume that the banks were able to work out a deal with Visa/MC where the fees would be low enough that it would outweigh the cost of implementing a competing system. On the Visa/MC side, I'm sure they now collect a LOT of merchant fees that - while smaller than a credit card fee - add up to a large amount of income that they wouldn't see if people were using cash or checks instead.
How many UK sites accept US debit cards, for that matter?
In America, we don't have a Switch/Interacc type of debit card. Anything issued by a bank is Visa or Mastercard branded. I thought it was completely bizarre when I lived in Canada for three years and they'd done it the other way. I couldn't figure out why anyone would think it was a good idea to introduce a new, incompatible card type.
So, to answer your question, any UK site accepts my debit card, because to them it looks like I'm using a Mastercard credit card.
I have some friends who work down there (not at Google, but the same area). They took me on a tour of it when I visited a few years ago. We walked by some small houses (looked like 2-3BR, single-car garage type of places) near where their office is, and they said every one of them was valued at over a million dollars.
Color for the sake of color on such a small device seems pointless to me
Colour is a good way to do groupings of keys into categories. I'm thinking of the keyboard for Avid in particular. Maybe you could go halfway and put greyscale LCDs on the tops of the keys, and have the sides be translucent white with a variable-colour LED inside? I don't know if that would be significantly cheaper in the end, though.
I think it will be at least 5 years before this technology is genuinely affordable in a consumer keyboard, but it will be cool when it is. I've wanted to have one since the early 90s, when I dreamed up something very similar to the full Optimus concept.
One push, and your relatives are notified by phone. Or, fail to push the button on a regular basis and a phone call comes from the monitoring service, who can also dispatch 911, etc.
I was originally thinking along those lines too - sort of the benevolent version of the 118 minute clock in Lost, or the Prozium wristwatches in Equilibrium. But then I remembered that you'd have the same problem as in Lost - never being able to get a full night's sleep. If the delay is longer than 7-8 hours, that's well outside the timeframe that the submitter is looking for.
The heart monitor linked at the top of the comments is cool too, but has its own drawbacks which were pointed out there.
This really sounds like something where there needs to be another person involved. For a child so disabled, there must be some sort of state assistance program, no?
If people started to go to jail because they stole Microsoft Windows XP or Office then you would see it come to a halt in the U.S.
Yeah, remember that time the US banned recreational drugs other than alcohol and tobacco, and the use of them came to a halt? Or that other time that most of the world banned prostitution and it came to a halt?
why has nobody developed a weapons system for fighters that can swivel
I imagine swivelling missle racks would be hard because if they're facing any direction other than straight ahead or straight back, they would be a huge aerodynamic flaw, and maybe get torn off entirely? The vulcan cannon in fighters are *huge* from what I've seen, which would make moving them around impractical.
I remember 4 years ago somebody told me that you could password protect your blackberry, and that all data would be destroyed on the 3rd (maybe 5th) incorrect password attempt.
Yes, the number of attempts is configurable by the system admin if you have your Blackberry hooked up to a corporate network. We have ours set to ten, for example.
I have noticed that more and more bright kids want to be lawyers or MBA's.
Maybe because they're bright enough to notice that those are the people who make the most money, while incurring the least risk?
Re:An HDTV isn't all you need to enjoy the PS3...
on
PS3 Problems Parried
·
· Score: 1
I couldn't tell you what's launching on the PS3 other than Untold Legend and presumably Ridge Racer.
I'm pretty sure that Sony's press conference was enough to burn into even the minds of dead Roman centurions and wooly mammoths frozen in ice that RRRRIDGE RRRRACER!!! RRRRIDGE RRRRACER!!!! was going to be on the PS3.
If Bethesda packaged up six months' worth of those into a $29.99 *offline* expansion pack, I would definitely buy it. As much as like their games, I'm not going to install DRM and then be nickel-and-dimed to death buying individual bits and bobs, only to have them not work in 5-10 years when I want to play the game again because the authorization servers don't exist any more.
I think that by the time the PS3's price drops enough to be considered reasonable by the average gamer, it will be far, far too late for it to do well in the marketplace - unless we consider "the marketplace" to be liquidators, a la "Atari Jaguar and 20 games for $49.99!"
IMO, companies like NVidia and ATI can be moderately successful selling to the tiny minority of people who will spend $500 on a video card, because the same technology is easy to adapt to the sub-$200 range that are sold to more people at the same time, will end up trickling down to the cheaper cards of 6/12/18/24/etc months in the future.
Sony can't use that same tactic, because it will be much longer than a year before the PS3 drops down to a reasonable (IE sub-$200) or even only-moderately-expensive (~$300) price range. By the time it does, it will be obsolete. They also aren't offering a genuine midrange bargain model. $500 is not a noticeably cheaper alternative that offers most of the same experience, it's a bad joke because it's still too expensive. If it were $300, it might have worked.
IMO, Sony (and the console market in general) are making the same type of mistakes that lead to a crash back in the 80s, and to other single-company failures like the Jaguar and the 3DO.
Microsoft isn't doing much better with the 360. Both companies' consoles are too expensive, and neither one comes with free bonuses to soften the blow to the wallet. MS could have included a stack of Xbox games to show off how much better they look in the emulator (there's plenty of good titles to choose from that are now in the bargain bin if available at all because of their age), but instead they've embraced their new nickel-and-dime-to-death Live Marketplace. Sony could have done the same with PS1 *and* 2 titles. It's cheap to make CDs and DVDs, especially since they wouldn't each need a case and cover.
but for some reason the idiodic press thought it was really cool and neat to invent a new word nobody would understand.
When I first saw it, I figured it was a reference to sending a text message to someone in advance of an actual phone call or in-person meeting - a sort of "super-humanal communication," or possibly Pre-Crime officers SMSing each other about an imminent murder.
I wouldn't really consider this an evolution of English, since it's some people making a mistake, instead of a new *rule* about pluralizing words that end in "us." Maybe if the people that write "virii" pluralized "bus" as "bii," "Prius" as "Priii," and "hummus" as "hummii," I'd be more inclined to support your point of view. Instead, it's one word, not even something as consistent as the *other* people who use the faux-German -en to pluralize nouns that end in "x."
Hey, maybe they can get together and agree to use "maus" instead of "mouse," but then fight over whether to make the plural "maii" or "mauxen."
The first batch of 3d GPU equipped video cards also seemed extravagantly expensive for the small gains they really delivered.
Small gains? Have you completely forgotten how much better the 3dfx Voodoo made games look? It was like night and day. That's why 3d accelerators became mass-market products.
The host OS's networking layer is totally bypassed and all commands are given to the card's stack. It's not really the same thing as TOE at all.
How is that going to work with things like the Microsoft ISA Firewall Client, Zonealarm-style software firewalls, or Google Desktop? Is the answer "not at all"?
Slashdot Mirror
They'd do much better asking a home improvement forum, rather than a bunch of computer nerds.
Slashdot seems like a decent place to ask questions about home automation-related projects. The submitter is asking about something fairly basic, but it's still part of a wired-up home.
One step beyond what you said - spyware, Steam, etc. have pushed me away from PC gaming altogether, towards the console.
I was of the same mindset, but look at how much the Xbox360 and PS3 depend on their respective online services. How long until all of them require the same sort of online authentication as Steam even for offline play?
It's called La fin du monde which is french for The end of the world
We have that here in Seattle too.
If you're ever down here, and it happens to be the right time of year, there is a pub/brewery in the University District called The Big Time Brewery that makes a 16% alcohol barleywine that is one of the tastiest dark beers I've ever had.
As for the rain, Seattle is hardly a really rainy city. I lived in Vancouver, BC for three years and it rained at least twice as much up there. At least during those three years, days where it was raining actually outnumbered days where it wasn't.
Why would they bother creating a physical model if they're only shooting the digital set?
A *really* well-built and shot model can still look at least as convincing as a CG render, IMO. Look at the Discovery in 2001 (which was enormous), the ships in all the Alien films (even the awful Resurrection has two great-looking ships that were made to look even nicer by the lighting and film stock used), the Super Star Destroyer, etc.
CG has been used to make some neat space ships, but in my experience they don't usually hold up as well over time, as the technology advances. I'm thinking of everything from The Last Starfighter to Babylon 5 to the Star Wars prequels. For me, at least, it's because when they're released, they have a wow factor due to looking better than the last CG movie, but as soon as something better comes along, the flaws become really evident.
I've also heard (though this may not be true any more) that building a physical model is more or less the same price as building a CG model of equal detail. Of course, with a CG model you can mass-replicate them and blow up as many as you want.
Even if someone were planning on going all-CG, it might make sense to build at least parts of the model physically. Model artists have some *awesome* tricks for detailing, so they could maybe put together a couple pieces for the CG team to work from.
Interesting. Thank you for elaborating on that.
These days, there is still a distinction between cards issued by banks (which are tied to a bank account) and credit cards, which are often issued by a third party. My credit card, for example, is provided by Egg, with whom I do not have a current account.
It's the same in the US (actually, most of what you said is true here as well), it's just that debit cards are branded the same way as credit cards instead of having a separate system like Switch or the Canadian Interacc. For example, I have two credit cards (one Visa, one Mastercard), and one debit card (Mastercard). The credit cards are not from my bank.
I assume that the banks were able to work out a deal with Visa/MC where the fees would be low enough that it would outweigh the cost of implementing a competing system. On the Visa/MC side, I'm sure they now collect a LOT of merchant fees that - while smaller than a credit card fee - add up to a large amount of income that they wouldn't see if people were using cash or checks instead.
How many UK sites accept US debit cards, for that matter?
In America, we don't have a Switch/Interacc type of debit card. Anything issued by a bank is Visa or Mastercard branded. I thought it was completely bizarre when I lived in Canada for three years and they'd done it the other way. I couldn't figure out why anyone would think it was a good idea to introduce a new, incompatible card type.
So, to answer your question, any UK site accepts my debit card, because to them it looks like I'm using a Mastercard credit card.
What does Barracuda give the admin in way of spam scoring flexibility? Jack shit.
We use a couple of Barracudas, and there's plenty of configuration options for the spam scoring. What were you looking for that you couldn't find?
$1700 seems steep, even for today's standards.
It's actually not, for that area.
I have some friends who work down there (not at Google, but the same area). They took me on a tour of it when I visited a few years ago. We walked by some small houses (looked like 2-3BR, single-car garage type of places) near where their office is, and they said every one of them was valued at over a million dollars.
Color for the sake of color on such a small device seems pointless to me
Colour is a good way to do groupings of keys into categories. I'm thinking of the keyboard for Avid in particular. Maybe you could go halfway and put greyscale LCDs on the tops of the keys, and have the sides be translucent white with a variable-colour LED inside? I don't know if that would be significantly cheaper in the end, though.
I think it will be at least 5 years before this technology is genuinely affordable in a consumer keyboard, but it will be cool when it is. I've wanted to have one since the early 90s, when I dreamed up something very similar to the full Optimus concept.
You'd think they'd build the city on the huge rolling hills, but, no, on the swamp where everyone has to swim.
Amusingly enough, Seattle before the big fire *was* built on the mud flats where Pioneer Square is today. The area flooded at high tide.
One push, and your relatives are notified by phone. Or, fail to push the button on a regular basis and a phone call comes from the monitoring service, who can also dispatch 911, etc.
I was originally thinking along those lines too - sort of the benevolent version of the 118 minute clock in Lost, or the Prozium wristwatches in Equilibrium. But then I remembered that you'd have the same problem as in Lost - never being able to get a full night's sleep. If the delay is longer than 7-8 hours, that's well outside the timeframe that the submitter is looking for.
The heart monitor linked at the top of the comments is cool too, but has its own drawbacks which were pointed out there.
This really sounds like something where there needs to be another person involved. For a child so disabled, there must be some sort of state assistance program, no?
If people started to go to jail because they stole Microsoft Windows XP or Office then you would see it come to a halt in the U.S.
Yeah, remember that time the US banned recreational drugs other than alcohol and tobacco, and the use of them came to a halt? Or that other time that most of the world banned prostitution and it came to a halt?
why has nobody developed a weapons system for fighters that can swivel
I imagine swivelling missle racks would be hard because if they're facing any direction other than straight ahead or straight back, they would be a huge aerodynamic flaw, and maybe get torn off entirely? The vulcan cannon in fighters are *huge* from what I've seen, which would make moving them around impractical.
I remember 4 years ago somebody told me that you could password protect your blackberry, and that all data would be destroyed on the 3rd (maybe 5th) incorrect password attempt.
Yes, the number of attempts is configurable by the system admin if you have your Blackberry hooked up to a corporate network. We have ours set to ten, for example.
I have noticed that more and more bright kids want to be lawyers or MBA's.
Maybe because they're bright enough to notice that those are the people who make the most money, while incurring the least risk?
I couldn't tell you what's launching on the PS3 other than Untold Legend and presumably Ridge Racer.
I'm pretty sure that Sony's press conference was enough to burn into even the minds of dead Roman centurions and wooly mammoths frozen in ice that RRRRIDGE RRRRACER!!! RRRRIDGE RRRRACER!!!! was going to be on the PS3.
It's also skewed towards people who use flickr as a photo dumping ground.
It's not a "photo dumping ground," it's a treasure trove of photographic imagery, with even the most obscure niche represented in abundance.
And then people learn that unless they need HDMI they are getting a PS3 that does everything they need for 499.
Gosh, $499 is such a bargain compared to $599, you've completely changed my mind about buying a PS3.
It's called slashdot. It's a self-regulated forum of intellectuals who espouse fairness, rational discourse, wit and good fellowship above all else.
Sigged! (in abbreviated form, darn you 120 character limit).
If Bethesda packaged up six months' worth of those into a $29.99 *offline* expansion pack, I would definitely buy it. As much as like their games, I'm not going to install DRM and then be nickel-and-dimed to death buying individual bits and bobs, only to have them not work in 5-10 years when I want to play the game again because the authorization servers don't exist any more.
When the price drops
I think that by the time the PS3's price drops enough to be considered reasonable by the average gamer, it will be far, far too late for it to do well in the marketplace - unless we consider "the marketplace" to be liquidators, a la "Atari Jaguar and 20 games for $49.99!"
IMO, companies like NVidia and ATI can be moderately successful selling to the tiny minority of people who will spend $500 on a video card, because the same technology is easy to adapt to the sub-$200 range that are sold to more people at the same time, will end up trickling down to the cheaper cards of 6/12/18/24/etc months in the future.
Sony can't use that same tactic, because it will be much longer than a year before the PS3 drops down to a reasonable (IE sub-$200) or even only-moderately-expensive (~$300) price range. By the time it does, it will be obsolete. They also aren't offering a genuine midrange bargain model. $500 is not a noticeably cheaper alternative that offers most of the same experience, it's a bad joke because it's still too expensive. If it were $300, it might have worked.
IMO, Sony (and the console market in general) are making the same type of mistakes that lead to a crash back in the 80s, and to other single-company failures like the Jaguar and the 3DO.
Microsoft isn't doing much better with the 360. Both companies' consoles are too expensive, and neither one comes with free bonuses to soften the blow to the wallet. MS could have included a stack of Xbox games to show off how much better they look in the emulator (there's plenty of good titles to choose from that are now in the bargain bin if available at all because of their age), but instead they've embraced their new nickel-and-dime-to-death Live Marketplace. Sony could have done the same with PS1 *and* 2 titles. It's cheap to make CDs and DVDs, especially since they wouldn't each need a case and cover.
but for some reason the idiodic press thought it was really cool and neat to invent a new word nobody would understand.
When I first saw it, I figured it was a reference to sending a text message to someone in advance of an actual phone call or in-person meeting - a sort of "super-humanal communication," or possibly Pre-Crime officers SMSing each other about an imminent murder.
Language evolves. Deal with it.
I wouldn't really consider this an evolution of English, since it's some people making a mistake, instead of a new *rule* about pluralizing words that end in "us." Maybe if the people that write "virii" pluralized "bus" as "bii," "Prius" as "Priii," and "hummus" as "hummii," I'd be more inclined to support your point of view. Instead, it's one word, not even something as consistent as the *other* people who use the faux-German -en to pluralize nouns that end in "x."
Hey, maybe they can get together and agree to use "maus" instead of "mouse," but then fight over whether to make the plural "maii" or "mauxen."
The first batch of 3d GPU equipped video cards also seemed extravagantly expensive for the small gains they really delivered.
Small gains? Have you completely forgotten how much better the 3dfx Voodoo made games look? It was like night and day. That's why 3d accelerators became mass-market products.
The host OS's networking layer is totally bypassed and all commands are given to the card's stack. It's not really the same thing as TOE at all.
How is that going to work with things like the Microsoft ISA Firewall Client, Zonealarm-style software firewalls, or Google Desktop? Is the answer "not at all"?