Is that decode only or encode/decode? I mean, is this Tivo/encoding farm material, or just another mildly interesting but ultimately impractical fad gadget?
My senior year in highschool (long ago in ye dinosaur days) the typing lab replaced all the typewriters with new computers. My school was behind the times even then so this was a big deal. I was one of maybe 3 people in my grade who knew what a modem was.
So, I started hanging out in the typing lab and maintaining the machines when the other kids would mess with them (security was virtually nonexistant, this was like DOS and win 3.1 days). In exchange for keeping things running, I got to hang out in the room (which was one of the only airconditioned rooms in the school) and play on the computers whenever I had a free period or just didn't feel like going to class. As long as I wasn't taking up a machine for a legitimate class that is. If they were full I'd just sit around in the back and read.
One time one of the typing teachers got pissed I was always in there and kicked me out. I was pretty pissed about it. I planned to get revenge on them by not maintaining the machines anymore, but that night the department chair called me at home and apologized for her, so I didn't.
All this for being around when teachers come running down the hall going "What's the thing to format a disk again, format semicolon A?"
Now that your program has reached 1.0, it is officially obsolete.:P
Anyone wanna help me with the next round of codecs?
What is this, bash Moller day?
on
NextFest
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yeah ok Moller has been promising the moon for ages and hasn't delivered yet. But at least he's Doing Something (TM). You can see prototypes, I've seen the video of the tethered flight. How many of you people bitching about his lack of progress have a flying car doing test flights in your back yard? Anyone? Until someone else shows me at least the same amount of progress he has you can shut up.
As for the transparent cloak... it's spiffy yes. All you need is a visible camera behind you and a visible projector in front of you and you can be invisible to people who can't spot cameras or projectors and come at you from one direction. Yay.
You know what I want to see? I want to see a PDA that doesn't suck i.e. lack a HD, or wireles connection, or ability to run mainstream software. I want to see an OS that can be both stable and play the latest games without screwing around with drivers and compiling shit all day or getting "Well it plays MOST games under emulation, except the ones YOU want." I want to see a broadband connection at a reasonable price that doesn't have shitty upstream or fulltime forced NAT or get capped as soon as you actually use the damn thing. Why doesn't anyone invent any of that stuff?
Yes, and this leads to the recent phenomena of buyracy (new term I've been using) where users or even companies will go out and buy a legit copy of a product, then never open it and pirate the same thing because the pirated version is easier to use. That way they have a legit license if anyone asks but they don't have to deal with the annoying crap.
The thing with "causual pirates" is they pretty much went away when the industry moved from floppy disks to cdroms. Most casual business or home users never managed to learn to copy cds because the process was never as simple as copying a floppy. These days most "casual pirates" get their pirated material from non-casual pirates who know where to find cracks, keygens, modified copies, etc. Upping the ante on the protection doesn't really stop casual piracy anymore because casual pirates just go to their "computer guy" and bug them to get a copy of whatever they want, usually in exhange for some non-monetary favor.
I mean it must be comforting to know you can just blacklist the compromised install keys that pirates use and be done with it right? I mean it's not like anyone could possibly have made a key generator for Windows XP right?
Is it just me or are anti-piracy measures just growing more and more inconvenient for legitimate users (product activation etc) and not at all more inconvenient for pirates (who get modified versions with the annoying features removed)?
Cause it breaks all their pirated games and apps? I suppose they could pirate new ones for it... oh wait there's only a few old ones they've gotten bored of already anyway.
Yes I'd like to be able to select execute this file instead of jumping through hoops to execute it anyway. Like I said, if they want to have the default be you can't execute it, and you have to go into preferences and change that, fine. Just let me freaking change it already. I'm obviously going to run the file if I really want to run it, stop inconveniencing me.
As I said, telling me what I want to do is "too dangerous" to allow is bullshit. I'm not a child, I can do what I want. Anything else and you might as well just start welding cases shut and putting DRM on all files. All I need to do is copy link location, paste it to IE. Wow, that was hard to circumvent. It's just irritating to have to launch another browser any time I want to run a file.
Ironicly, I have yet to see any of those pictures you're probably talking about, since I haven't been watching TV or reading the paper lately. I have seen parodies of them and heard lots of descriptions so I'm fairly sure I'm not missing anything I'd want to see.
I have no idea who could have thought that using executable scripts was a good idea. It was probably the same people who thought up those annoying frames and then used their massive 85% marketshare monopoly to force everyone else to comply. I hope someone will someday give them what they have coming.
Now if only they'll let me run an executable directly instead of having to copy and paste it to IE I wouldn't need another browser installed anymore. Whatever happened to letting people do whatever they wanted with their software? I'm tired of having to save and hunt for driver updates in my temp directory, or dig for anything I was forced to save because some moron made a self executable zip file instead of a standard one. Just let me run the damn file, I know what I'm doing. You wanna protect people? Fine, make it an option with default to on and I'll just turn it off on my browser. Telling me I can't do this with the browser because of "security reasons" is retarded and contradictory to the stated design philosophy. You might as well just force my homepage to your site and say "Oh we can't let you change that for security reasons."
Where you don't need to do anything damaging or hurtful to commit a crime, just have the wrong information on your computer.
Yay for removal of civil liberties. Oh did the sites any of the images came from get sued? Of course not, it's not their fault they're publishing illegal material (if it even is illegal).
Because we all know looking at pictures is bad. I mean people always do bad things they see in pictures, right? I just can't wait until they finish the thought listening machine so we won't even need pictures for evidence. It'll just be "Hey you! You had bad thoughts about that person, you're obviously going to act on them, get in jail!" Or "Hey you, you thought about doing drugs! We can't have people using untaxed substances to enjoy themselves without hurting others, get in jail so you can learn to become a good consumer of only the harmful products our society approves of and generates money from at the expense of public health!" or "Hey you! You thought the person in charge of this country might be wrong! That's obviously not allowed, come here so we can kill you!"
Hmm, sounds like that one you're working on might have a winsock error, I'd see them every now and then. There's a registry fix over on MS's site but it's a pain in the ass, usually better to just reimage it.
My latest problem is actually on my own system. It absolutely will not let me go to windows update. It just keeps giving me an "Administrator's Only" page saying I'm not logged in as an admin. But I am. Even when I log in as administrator as in the official account. There was some fix instructions from MS for this bug, but after doing them it didn't work. So now I just have to try and remember what patches I'm supposed to download and go find them manually, which is a bitch.
When I was working in phone support for a major ISP one of the biggest problems we had was people wouldn't call in about spyware problems until their machines were SO hosed they couldn't even GET to the sites to download removal tools. So eventually I started bugging my supervisor and various higher ups until we put spybot in a small public ftp that we all memorized the IP adress of. That way when the users called in, what we'd do is have them open a command prompt, and walk them through an ftp on the command line to get the file. Sure it'd take 5 minutes to explain all the crap to type in, but it's way better than the usual "Wait I can't see the link anymore, there's a popup. Let me close it. Ok there's 3 popups, I'll close them. Ok wait I'll just reboot" etc that'd take half an hour. Command line ftp doesn't trigger all the resident hijack crap because it doesn't use the browser.
Thing is development cost is high for the inital development. Since the PSP is essentially a mini-PS2 as you put it, ports will be far easier than redoing a game from scratch to fit a traditional handheld's meager resources. These days companies really like it if you can recycle most of your effort spent on making a game into a fairly cheap and easy port, like Xbox to PC. PS2 to PSP ports will probably be what kills GBA. I don't own a PS2 yet specificly because I'm more interested in the PSP and playing the same games but with wireless support and wherever I want to go.
Back in the day when Playstation was new, everyone thought Sony had gone absolutely insane entering the console market because they'd made almost no good games for existing consoles.
But what they did instead was interesting. Sony made alot of programming tools for the PS and helped developers make games on it. Sega's Saturn was technically more powerful but a pain in the ass to program for, and Sega kept all the best secrets to themselves for their own games. Nintendo 64 was much more powerful, but stayed on the expensive cartridge format and Nintendo liked to have control over who could make what for the system, both of which scared off many developers. Sony didn't have a reason to keep secrets or keep other software developers behind them, as they didn't really have their own software divisions worried about keeping an edge over competition. It was only later when games like Gran Turismo came out that Sony started making decent games themselves.
I think Nintendo's going to lose this fight just because they're too used to getting their way and ruling their software library with an iron fist. Granted it's lightened up a bit since the SNES bloodless Mortal Kombat days, but I think Sony's just going to bring more developers to the market with them.
Not a problem, I've been known to do all my routine maintenance stuff at the same time. That means burning files from a drive on the fly (no ISO first) while defragmenting it. Usually I'll watch a movie or some anime too cause it's boring. Sometimes I can almost get my CPU use up to 30%. The new fancy buffer underrun protection on most drives makes it less of a challenge though, I remember the days before that it'd really impress people. I'd be playing team fortress and the map would end and I'd be like "BRB, CD's done burning, gotta put the next one in!" I miss the days when my P2-300 was nice and new, nowadays it's just taken for granted you're not getting a coaster unless your dog eats your disc while it's burning or something.
P.S. Thanks 3ware and DPT before them, and Ricoh Plextor and Liteon.
Bah. You really wanna impress me?
on
WiFi On Two Wheels
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· Score: 3, Funny
Someone miniaturize a wifi hotspot enough so that you can strap it to a pidgeon, then put some around New York. Then I'll really be impressed! Access for peanuts... or breadcrumbs... hey let's try squirrels maybe then it can be for peanuts.
It's true. You can use dd to image a disk from a RAID set to another disk that isn't identical, and the controller will still believe it's part of the array and work. I know cause I had to do it once to recover 150GB of data. =)
You'd think it'd be easy to do something like retest every permutation of the subject line with one character deleted, since most of what I get is Vi(agra Via_gra v|iagra etc. Or maybe "Hmm, if v i a g r and a have appeared in the line within the last twelve characters in that specific order, it's spam." How many cases are there that have twelve characters containing v i a g r a in order that could possibly be legitimate?
My main gripe over on my mail.com account is they don't filter sidenafil citrate, which is generic viagra. How many legitimate mails have the word sidenafil in them?
Slashdot Mirror
Is that decode only or encode/decode? I mean, is this Tivo/encoding farm material, or just another mildly interesting but ultimately impractical fad gadget?
My senior year in highschool (long ago in ye dinosaur days) the typing lab replaced all the typewriters with new computers. My school was behind the times even then so this was a big deal. I was one of maybe 3 people in my grade who knew what a modem was.
So, I started hanging out in the typing lab and maintaining the machines when the other kids would mess with them (security was virtually nonexistant, this was like DOS and win 3.1 days). In exchange for keeping things running, I got to hang out in the room (which was one of the only airconditioned rooms in the school) and play on the computers whenever I had a free period or just didn't feel like going to class. As long as I wasn't taking up a machine for a legitimate class that is. If they were full I'd just sit around in the back and read.
One time one of the typing teachers got pissed I was always in there and kicked me out. I was pretty pissed about it. I planned to get revenge on them by not maintaining the machines anymore, but that night the department chair called me at home and apologized for her, so I didn't.
All this for being around when teachers come running down the hall going "What's the thing to format a disk again, format semicolon A?"
How about one of these for $20 and an x10 cam strapped to the front? I'll sell em to the marines for 1/10th what CMU wants for theirs.
Now that your program has reached 1.0, it is officially obsolete. :P
Anyone wanna help me with the next round of codecs?
Yeah ok Moller has been promising the moon for ages and hasn't delivered yet. But at least he's Doing Something (TM). You can see prototypes, I've seen the video of the tethered flight. How many of you people bitching about his lack of progress have a flying car doing test flights in your back yard? Anyone? Until someone else shows me at least the same amount of progress he has you can shut up.
As for the transparent cloak... it's spiffy yes. All you need is a visible camera behind you and a visible projector in front of you and you can be invisible to people who can't spot cameras or projectors and come at you from one direction. Yay.
You know what I want to see? I want to see a PDA that doesn't suck i.e. lack a HD, or wireles connection, or ability to run mainstream software. I want to see an OS that can be both stable and play the latest games without screwing around with drivers and compiling shit all day or getting "Well it plays MOST games under emulation, except the ones YOU want." I want to see a broadband connection at a reasonable price that doesn't have shitty upstream or fulltime forced NAT or get capped as soon as you actually use the damn thing. Why doesn't anyone invent any of that stuff?
Yes, and this leads to the recent phenomena of buyracy (new term I've been using) where users or even companies will go out and buy a legit copy of a product, then never open it and pirate the same thing because the pirated version is easier to use. That way they have a legit license if anyone asks but they don't have to deal with the annoying crap.
The thing with "causual pirates" is they pretty much went away when the industry moved from floppy disks to cdroms. Most casual business or home users never managed to learn to copy cds because the process was never as simple as copying a floppy. These days most "casual pirates" get their pirated material from non-casual pirates who know where to find cracks, keygens, modified copies, etc. Upping the ante on the protection doesn't really stop casual piracy anymore because casual pirates just go to their "computer guy" and bug them to get a copy of whatever they want, usually in exhange for some non-monetary favor.
I mean it must be comforting to know you can just blacklist the compromised install keys that pirates use and be done with it right? I mean it's not like anyone could possibly have made a key generator for Windows XP right?
Is it just me or are anti-piracy measures just growing more and more inconvenient for legitimate users (product activation etc) and not at all more inconvenient for pirates (who get modified versions with the annoying features removed)?
Cause it breaks all their pirated games and apps? I suppose they could pirate new ones for it... oh wait there's only a few old ones they've gotten bored of already anyway.
Yes I'd like to be able to select execute this file instead of jumping through hoops to execute it anyway. Like I said, if they want to have the default be you can't execute it, and you have to go into preferences and change that, fine. Just let me freaking change it already. I'm obviously going to run the file if I really want to run it, stop inconveniencing me.
As I said, telling me what I want to do is "too dangerous" to allow is bullshit. I'm not a child, I can do what I want. Anything else and you might as well just start welding cases shut and putting DRM on all files. All I need to do is copy link location, paste it to IE. Wow, that was hard to circumvent. It's just irritating to have to launch another browser any time I want to run a file.
Wow really? I never would have guessed that. (/sarcasm)
But how does that solve the problem of the browser won't let me open an exe without saving it first?
Ironicly, I have yet to see any of those pictures you're probably talking about, since I haven't been watching TV or reading the paper lately. I have seen parodies of them and heard lots of descriptions so I'm fairly sure I'm not missing anything I'd want to see.
I have no idea who could have thought that using executable scripts was a good idea. It was probably the same people who thought up those annoying frames and then used their massive 85% marketshare monopoly to force everyone else to comply. I hope someone will someday give them what they have coming.
Doesn't matter when international quasi-legal corporate organizations are the ones pushing the lawsuits. There is no safe country anymore.
Now if only they'll let me run an executable directly instead of having to copy and paste it to IE I wouldn't need another browser installed anymore. Whatever happened to letting people do whatever they wanted with their software? I'm tired of having to save and hunt for driver updates in my temp directory, or dig for anything I was forced to save because some moron made a self executable zip file instead of a standard one. Just let me run the damn file, I know what I'm doing. You wanna protect people? Fine, make it an option with default to on and I'll just turn it off on my browser. Telling me I can't do this with the browser because of "security reasons" is retarded and contradictory to the stated design philosophy. You might as well just force my homepage to your site and say "Oh we can't let you change that for security reasons."
Where you don't need to do anything damaging or hurtful to commit a crime, just have the wrong information on your computer.
Yay for removal of civil liberties. Oh did the sites any of the images came from get sued? Of course not, it's not their fault they're publishing illegal material (if it even is illegal).
Because we all know looking at pictures is bad. I mean people always do bad things they see in pictures, right? I just can't wait until they finish the thought listening machine so we won't even need pictures for evidence. It'll just be "Hey you! You had bad thoughts about that person, you're obviously going to act on them, get in jail!" Or "Hey you, you thought about doing drugs! We can't have people using untaxed substances to enjoy themselves without hurting others, get in jail so you can learn to become a good consumer of only the harmful products our society approves of and generates money from at the expense of public health!" or "Hey you! You thought the person in charge of this country might be wrong! That's obviously not allowed, come here so we can kill you!"
Hmm, sounds like that one you're working on might have a winsock error, I'd see them every now and then. There's a registry fix over on MS's site but it's a pain in the ass, usually better to just reimage it.
My latest problem is actually on my own system. It absolutely will not let me go to windows update. It just keeps giving me an "Administrator's Only" page saying I'm not logged in as an admin. But I am. Even when I log in as administrator as in the official account. There was some fix instructions from MS for this bug, but after doing them it didn't work. So now I just have to try and remember what patches I'm supposed to download and go find them manually, which is a bitch.
When I was working in phone support for a major ISP one of the biggest problems we had was people wouldn't call in about spyware problems until their machines were SO hosed they couldn't even GET to the sites to download removal tools. So eventually I started bugging my supervisor and various higher ups until we put spybot in a small public ftp that we all memorized the IP adress of. That way when the users called in, what we'd do is have them open a command prompt, and walk them through an ftp on the command line to get the file. Sure it'd take 5 minutes to explain all the crap to type in, but it's way better than the usual "Wait I can't see the link anymore, there's a popup. Let me close it. Ok there's 3 popups, I'll close them. Ok wait I'll just reboot" etc that'd take half an hour. Command line ftp doesn't trigger all the resident hijack crap because it doesn't use the browser.
Thing is development cost is high for the inital development. Since the PSP is essentially a mini-PS2 as you put it, ports will be far easier than redoing a game from scratch to fit a traditional handheld's meager resources. These days companies really like it if you can recycle most of your effort spent on making a game into a fairly cheap and easy port, like Xbox to PC. PS2 to PSP ports will probably be what kills GBA. I don't own a PS2 yet specificly because I'm more interested in the PSP and playing the same games but with wireless support and wherever I want to go.
And how do you get the best games?
Back in the day when Playstation was new, everyone thought Sony had gone absolutely insane entering the console market because they'd made almost no good games for existing consoles.
But what they did instead was interesting. Sony made alot of programming tools for the PS and helped developers make games on it. Sega's Saturn was technically more powerful but a pain in the ass to program for, and Sega kept all the best secrets to themselves for their own games. Nintendo 64 was much more powerful, but stayed on the expensive cartridge format and Nintendo liked to have control over who could make what for the system, both of which scared off many developers. Sony didn't have a reason to keep secrets or keep other software developers behind them, as they didn't really have their own software divisions worried about keeping an edge over competition. It was only later when games like Gran Turismo came out that Sony started making decent games themselves.
I think Nintendo's going to lose this fight just because they're too used to getting their way and ruling their software library with an iron fist. Granted it's lightened up a bit since the SNES bloodless Mortal Kombat days, but I think Sony's just going to bring more developers to the market with them.
Not a problem, I've been known to do all my routine maintenance stuff at the same time. That means burning files from a drive on the fly (no ISO first) while defragmenting it. Usually I'll watch a movie or some anime too cause it's boring. Sometimes I can almost get my CPU use up to 30%. The new fancy buffer underrun protection on most drives makes it less of a challenge though, I remember the days before that it'd really impress people. I'd be playing team fortress and the map would end and I'd be like "BRB, CD's done burning, gotta put the next one in!" I miss the days when my P2-300 was nice and new, nowadays it's just taken for granted you're not getting a coaster unless your dog eats your disc while it's burning or something.
P.S. Thanks 3ware and DPT before them, and Ricoh Plextor and Liteon.
Someone miniaturize a wifi hotspot enough so that you can strap it to a pidgeon, then put some around New York. Then I'll really be impressed! Access for peanuts... or breadcrumbs... hey let's try squirrels maybe then it can be for peanuts.
I once got 17 12packs of mountain dew from office depot for $30 thanks to spoofee. Good if you're in a dorm.
:P
The UPS guy was not happy about delivering it, and asked me what it cost to ship. It was free.
Then my roommates and friends all found out and got the same deal. I think we burned through 2 or 3 UPS guys that year.
It's true. You can use dd to image a disk from a RAID set to another disk that isn't identical, and the controller will still believe it's part of the array and work. I know cause I had to do it once to recover 150GB of data. =)
Tried ghost, forget about it.
You'd think it'd be easy to do something like retest every permutation of the subject line with one character deleted, since most of what I get is Vi(agra Via_gra v|iagra etc. Or maybe "Hmm, if v i a g r and a have appeared in the line within the last twelve characters in that specific order, it's spam." How many cases are there that have twelve characters containing v i a g r a in order that could possibly be legitimate?
My main gripe over on my mail.com account is they don't filter sidenafil citrate, which is generic viagra. How many legitimate mails have the word sidenafil in them?