i constantly see people driving right next to tractor trailers, boxed in with nowhere to go, and they just stay there, refusing to speed up or pass because they're going the speed limit and won't dare go a single tick faster.
Usually that's someone who has their cruise control on and never discovered the accelerate button. Those people cause a huge line of tailgaters to form (waiting in the left lane to pass) causing all sorts of hazardous conditions and they're rarely if ever pulled over (in NJ the left lane is for passing only and my friend was pulled over for not passing the car to his right while there was a cop behind him, but he didn't pass the car to the right because he didn't want to speed in front of the cop.)
My girlfriend lives in a big apartment building with a really crappy wireless router for the tenants in the basement, we're on the 4th floor. Currently we're using some wireless connection from a nearby home, and I can't imagine that I'm the only person in the world doing this. Then there are people who browse through a proxy. Did anyone tell them that the IP address of a blog commenter is quite useless?
'I believe their argument is that while DRM doesn't work perfectly,' says Wardell, 'it does make it more difficult for someone to get the game for free in the first five or six days of its release. That's when a lot of the sales take place and that's when the royalties from the retailers are determined. Publishers would be very happy for a first week without "warez" copies circulating on the Web.'"
Let us consider, for a moment, a DRM-loaded game from the past year.
Spore.
Its DRM was considered by some to be so limiting that some people simply never played the game. People were exasperated that, at release, it allowed only one user account per copy. That installs couldn't be "restored" by uninstalling the game (many of these things have been added since).
Thank you.
I was about to post exactly the same comment. I purchase Spore legally when it came out, using EA's downloader. It was a few days before the U.S. release (the game had been released in Australia already) and I thought "Oh I guess if you get it online you get it early." I guessed wrong, it downloaded 99% of the game and stopped.
That really bothered me, I just wanted to play the game that I legally purchased. If I knew that I was only going to get 99% and the release date would still be the same I would have bought it at a store with the pretty box, physical copy of the CD (which I can easily install on my two main computers), no EA downloader, and an instruction manual. So I went to the pirate bay, found the ISO, downloaded it, installed it, and used my legally acquired serial to play. Plus when it came time to install it on my second computer, it was a lot easier to just copy the ISO over to the second computer rather than installing the EA downloader and downloading the entire game again.
Cyber Guantanamo - wouldn't that be like making them use AOL over a 9600 baud modem? Or would that be considered torture by the Geneva Convention?
*shudders*
I actually started out on the internet with AOL over a 2400 bit/s modem (back when they charged per hour.) Chat rooms would lag, I would usually get a page of text, pause for 5 seconds, another page of text. It was terrific for me though since AOL over a slower than molasses connection was all I knew of the internet at the time. I remember downloading the first big file (a wav file of a song from a video game) over that connection. Took me about 12 hours to do it (left my computer on all night, my parents didn't like that months bill.) Didn't get a new modem till 56K came out (I just didn't have the money, I was still in junior high.)
An education is only worth what you think it is worth. I grew up in a family with low expectation but high possibilities and decided to run with the eduction. My brother decided to screw all the girls that he could convince to drop their pants. I'm now posting on slashdot, he isn't even sure what a computer is.
I'm confused as to what your point is, what do you and your brother do now? Sure you post on slashdot and he might not know what a computer is, but if you're posting to slashdot from your mother's basement while he's out on his private yacht with even more girls then you really haven't accomplished much. Unless of course your goal in life was to post on slashdot from your mother's basement...
From your post it seem as if you're equating not knowing how to use a computer with failure and lack of intelligence. I know plenty of very intelligent, successful people who couldn't figure out how to turn on a computer if their life depended on it.
How did I get so much for a computer you could find in a dumpster? Easy, the customers 286 was fried in a lightning storm. He used the thing with some very very old DOS based software that ran his embroidery machine. I happened to have a 386 lying around that ran everything just fine. Even installed Windows 3.1 on the thing.
Sometimes a 40 gig drive is a lot more valuable than a 1TB drive. Especially when it's the difference in replacing one old broken component vs buying all new hardware/software that you're not even sure will work with what you've got.
It's the output devices that are not allowed or locked down. No CD/DVD burners, floppy drives, or USB ports (to put on a flash drive.) So basically you can't use any sort of removable media and you can't hook up the VGA output to a device that can record it.
By that definition so is any phone. You can still call your voicemail number whether it's from a landline or a cell phone. It wouldn't make sense to ban mobile phones for that reason if they did not also ban all phones.
Perhaps the serenity of being next to your significant other results in perfect code. If any friskiness starts up, then maybe itâ(TM)s time to go back out to the couch.
I'm sure it was only intended as a joke, but if any friskiness starts up while you're coding in bed, and you choose to move to the couch, then maybe it's time to rethink your priorities.
a) They're proprietary and need special players to play.
Yeah, like VLC, or mplayer
b) Said player is the worst media player in history.
I happen to like VLC and mplayer very much.
c) Said player also tries to take over my entire machine. It installs an iPod sync service even though I haven't got an iPod. It replaces all the multimedia mime types in all my browsers and refuses to let go - reconfiguring the browsers on every reboot (does Firefox really need itunes plugin to display a JPG file?)
Ah you're talking about quicktime, just get the standalone version without itunes and it won't install any services. Or download VLC or mplayer.
d) All that just to watch a video file? Seriously? No thanks.
PS: Any digital camera makers who think.mov is a good video format, take note. Also any webmaster who thinks.mov is a good format for web page viewing because "it works on a Mac".
PPS: Yes, I've heard of quicktimealt but I want the.mov format to die (see above).
Well I edited videos in imovie, and now Final Cut Express,.mov is perfect for me and my videos play for anyone I know. Most of those people use linux computers and with windows it's even easier.
Imagine twenty gallons of gasoline blowing up. Yikes!
There isn't enough oxygen in your gas tank to allow an explosion, batteries aren't as picky.
Defective batteries spontaneously exploding are a lot more common than defective gas tanks exploding. You might bring up the Pinto, but that was a poor design choice, not a defective gas tank (the gas tank functioned exactly as Ford intended it to, they just put it in a bad location.)
The site doesn't seem to mention it, but why a wiimote? Why not a standard RC joystick?
The wiimote is okay with games, where misjudging the position of the wiimote will just screw up a virtual character. But why bring that into the real world where misjudging the position of the wiimote will send an industrial mower (with very sharp very fast spinning blades) off in the wrong direction? At least with the standard RC joystick if you let go of the control it'll snap back to the center and the mower would stop. You don't have the same feature with a wiimote, if you want to stop the mower you have to find the neutral zone yourself, if you drop the wiimote, the mower will go shooting off in some potentially dangerous direction (especially when near a road.)
This thing is going to retail for $380. For $19 more I can buy a PS3, install their linux distro, play all of the games this system can play, all of the games PS3 can play, and also play blu-ray movies.
I'd really like to know, who is their target audience?
VLC is an OK media playback application. I, for one, never understood why someone would prefer it over using mplayer.
I used mplayer for years, I tried a windows binary, didn't like it much. The command prompt is horrible in windows, and all of the GUIs I've found just didn't work all that well. VLC was a nice slim media player, worked well with any file I threw at it (like mplayer), it had a nice playlist I could drag and drop files onto, and it was easy to use. Same thing on my mac.
In linux I use mplayer for everything, but linux is more command line based, I'm used to it. I know how to quickly navigate a linux system with the command line. There isn't some fancy windows explorer or finder that I want to integrate nicely with on linux so mplayer works just fine for me in that situation. But seeing as how most people use windows or mac, VLC is very easy to install and will play just about anything, it's kind of obvious why most people would use it.
"Long story short, the GeForce takes the cake with impressive performance at its price, while the Radeon didn't show a high improvement over the cheaper Radeon 4870."
Both articles say the same thing, the GeForce 275 is a better performer, and the 4890 isn't a much higher improvement over the 4870 (though it is still an improvement.)
Absolutely free text messages would result in people using them for everything, including massive file transfers. (hey, people use gmail as a storage drive. I can't wait for textmsg2avi to come out.:P )
I've had absolutely free text messaging for a few years now, I'm fairly certain every carrier offers it as an option unless maybe you're on a prepaid plan or something (though they could also offer unlimited texting, I'm not sure as I never had a prepaid plan.)
I really thought there was going to be something special here, that the ancient Egyptians found some way to preserve data better we do now in modern society.
Does the author not realize that he's only looking at a rock that survived, and not one of the millions of rocks that turned to dust over the years?
If someone in 5,000 years finds a USB flash drive exhibit in some park with the data still readable off the device, that will not be proof that USB flash storage is the ultimate in storage technology, it'll only prove that that one USB flash drive lasted for 5,000 years.
There's a company in my office building (http://www.rpi.edu/dept/incubator/homepage/ethermetrics.html) that's doing something similar, except they have a device much smaller, that plugs into your power meter and gives the reading for the whole house.
It uses little to no power but requires an ethernet cable to get online. It's got a built in web server and you can log in to check your power usage. They don't have much of a website yet though they've got a working prototype and I'd definitely get one for my own house (it'd be nice to know my own power usage stats.)
Some of them we tossed carelessly aside...
on
10 OSes We Left Behind
·
· Score: 4, Funny
FTA: "Some of them we tossed carelessly aside. (Adios, Windows Me!)"
I took great care in building a trebuchet capable of tossing Windows Me far enough from in order to keep it from further damaging my poor, unsuspecting PC.
6. "Although this proposal, and the people behind it, are certifiable, the idea that a theory of evolution holds some special uncriticizable position because of the 'preponderance of evidence' is just as stifling to scientific progress as the dogmatic fervor with which academia held to Newton's theory of gravitation. A theory should always be accepted as necessarily conjectural, and all efforts should be made to falsify the accepted 'best' theory and replace it with a better theory." -Me
So let me get this straight, you think we should entertain the idea of replacing the theory of evolution with the theory that the earth is only 10,000 years old and life came about in it's current form by way of a "magic man"?
How do you go about testing the "magic man" theory?
(I'm not saying you support the "magic man" theory in any way, I somewhat get your point. It's just that they don't want to replace the theory of evolution with a better theory, they want to replace it with "magic".)
How does cloud computing solve the CPU-GPU bandwidth issues of modern games? Gamers still want to see the game, and at ultra high rez & IQ.
I'd imagine it does all of the CPU-GPU processing off-site, so essentially your video game is just a streaming video that you can control. The quality won't be nearly as good.
I think this technology is rather pointless, my computer was mid-level 3 years ago and it still plays the newest games just fine. If the person saved that $50 a year and just upgraded their video card every 4 years they'd be fine. They could even buy a used version of what was the "latest and greatest" or with SLI buy a second video card (at a much lower price than the first.)
Slashdot Mirror
i constantly see people driving right next to tractor trailers, boxed in with nowhere to go, and they just stay there, refusing to speed up or pass because they're going the speed limit and won't dare go a single tick faster.
Usually that's someone who has their cruise control on and never discovered the accelerate button. Those people cause a huge line of tailgaters to form (waiting in the left lane to pass) causing all sorts of hazardous conditions and they're rarely if ever pulled over (in NJ the left lane is for passing only and my friend was pulled over for not passing the car to his right while there was a cop behind him, but he didn't pass the car to the right because he didn't want to speed in front of the cop.)
My girlfriend lives in a big apartment building with a really crappy wireless router for the tenants in the basement, we're on the 4th floor. Currently we're using some wireless connection from a nearby home, and I can't imagine that I'm the only person in the world doing this. Then there are people who browse through a proxy. Did anyone tell them that the IP address of a blog commenter is quite useless?
'I believe their argument is that while DRM doesn't work perfectly,' says Wardell, 'it does make it more difficult for someone to get the game for free in the first five or six days of its release. That's when a lot of the sales take place and that's when the royalties from the retailers are determined. Publishers would be very happy for a first week without "warez" copies circulating on the Web.'"
Let us consider, for a moment, a DRM-loaded game from the past year.
Spore.
Its DRM was considered by some to be so limiting that some people simply never played the game. People were exasperated that, at release, it allowed only one user account per copy. That installs couldn't be "restored" by uninstalling the game (many of these things have been added since).
Thank you.
I was about to post exactly the same comment. I purchase Spore legally when it came out, using EA's downloader. It was a few days before the U.S. release (the game had been released in Australia already) and I thought "Oh I guess if you get it online you get it early." I guessed wrong, it downloaded 99% of the game and stopped.
That really bothered me, I just wanted to play the game that I legally purchased. If I knew that I was only going to get 99% and the release date would still be the same I would have bought it at a store with the pretty box, physical copy of the CD (which I can easily install on my two main computers), no EA downloader, and an instruction manual. So I went to the pirate bay, found the ISO, downloaded it, installed it, and used my legally acquired serial to play. Plus when it came time to install it on my second computer, it was a lot easier to just copy the ISO over to the second computer rather than installing the EA downloader and downloading the entire game again.
Cyber Guantanamo - wouldn't that be like making them use AOL over a 9600 baud modem? Or would that be considered torture by the Geneva Convention?
*shudders*
I actually started out on the internet with AOL over a 2400 bit/s modem (back when they charged per hour.) Chat rooms would lag, I would usually get a page of text, pause for 5 seconds, another page of text. It was terrific for me though since AOL over a slower than molasses connection was all I knew of the internet at the time. I remember downloading the first big file (a wav file of a song from a video game) over that connection. Took me about 12 hours to do it (left my computer on all night, my parents didn't like that months bill.) Didn't get a new modem till 56K came out (I just didn't have the money, I was still in junior high.)
An education is only worth what you think it is worth. I grew up in a family with low expectation but high possibilities and decided to run with the eduction. My brother decided to screw all the girls that he could convince to drop their pants. I'm now posting on slashdot, he isn't even sure what a computer is.
I'm confused as to what your point is, what do you and your brother do now? Sure you post on slashdot and he might not know what a computer is, but if you're posting to slashdot from your mother's basement while he's out on his private yacht with even more girls then you really haven't accomplished much. Unless of course your goal in life was to post on slashdot from your mother's basement...
From your post it seem as if you're equating not knowing how to use a computer with failure and lack of intelligence. I know plenty of very intelligent, successful people who couldn't figure out how to turn on a computer if their life depended on it.
I sold a 386 just a few years ago for $175.
How did I get so much for a computer you could find in a dumpster? Easy, the customers 286 was fried in a lightning storm. He used the thing with some very very old DOS based software that ran his embroidery machine. I happened to have a 386 lying around that ran everything just fine. Even installed Windows 3.1 on the thing.
Sometimes a 40 gig drive is a lot more valuable than a 1TB drive. Especially when it's the difference in replacing one old broken component vs buying all new hardware/software that you're not even sure will work with what you've got.
It's the output devices that are not allowed or locked down. No CD/DVD burners, floppy drives, or USB ports (to put on a flash drive.) So basically you can't use any sort of removable media and you can't hook up the VGA output to a device that can record it.
By that definition so is any phone. You can still call your voicemail number whether it's from a landline or a cell phone. It wouldn't make sense to ban mobile phones for that reason if they did not also ban all phones.
Perhaps the serenity of being next to your significant other results in perfect code. If any friskiness starts up, then maybe itâ(TM)s time to go back out to the couch.
I'm sure it was only intended as a joke, but if any friskiness starts up while you're coding in bed, and you choose to move to the couch, then maybe it's time to rethink your priorities.
I boycott mov files because:
a) They're proprietary and need special players to play.
Yeah, like VLC, or mplayer
b) Said player is the worst media player in history.
I happen to like VLC and mplayer very much.
c) Said player also tries to take over my entire machine. It installs an iPod sync service even though I haven't got an iPod. It replaces all the multimedia mime types in all my browsers and refuses to let go - reconfiguring the browsers on every reboot (does Firefox really need itunes plugin to display a JPG file?)
Ah you're talking about quicktime, just get the standalone version without itunes and it won't install any services. Or download VLC or mplayer.
d) All that just to watch a video file? Seriously? No thanks.
PS: Any digital camera makers who think .mov is a good video format, take note. Also any webmaster who thinks .mov is a good format for web page viewing because "it works on a Mac".
PPS: Yes, I've heard of quicktimealt but I want the .mov format to die (see above).
Well I edited videos in imovie, and now Final Cut Express, .mov is perfect for me and my videos play for anyone I know. Most of those people use linux computers and with windows it's even easier.
Imagine twenty gallons of gasoline blowing up. Yikes!
There isn't enough oxygen in your gas tank to allow an explosion, batteries aren't as picky.
Defective batteries spontaneously exploding are a lot more common than defective gas tanks exploding. You might bring up the Pinto, but that was a poor design choice, not a defective gas tank (the gas tank functioned exactly as Ford intended it to, they just put it in a bad location.)
The site seems to be slashdoted, so here's the Google cache and a Youtube video
The site doesn't seem to mention it, but why a wiimote? Why not a standard RC joystick?
The wiimote is okay with games, where misjudging the position of the wiimote will just screw up a virtual character. But why bring that into the real world where misjudging the position of the wiimote will send an industrial mower (with very sharp very fast spinning blades) off in the wrong direction? At least with the standard RC joystick if you let go of the control it'll snap back to the center and the mower would stop. You don't have the same feature with a wiimote, if you want to stop the mower you have to find the neutral zone yourself, if you drop the wiimote, the mower will go shooting off in some potentially dangerous direction (especially when near a road.)
Did anyone else notice the largest drop on that graph occurred right after this article -
Craigslist to crack down on prostitution ads
This thing is going to retail for $380. For $19 more I can buy a PS3, install their linux distro, play all of the games this system can play, all of the games PS3 can play, and also play blu-ray movies.
I'd really like to know, who is their target audience?
VLC is an OK media playback application. I, for one, never understood why someone would prefer it over using mplayer.
I used mplayer for years, I tried a windows binary, didn't like it much. The command prompt is horrible in windows, and all of the GUIs I've found just didn't work all that well. VLC was a nice slim media player, worked well with any file I threw at it (like mplayer), it had a nice playlist I could drag and drop files onto, and it was easy to use. Same thing on my mac.
In linux I use mplayer for everything, but linux is more command line based, I'm used to it. I know how to quickly navigate a linux system with the command line. There isn't some fancy windows explorer or finder that I want to integrate nicely with on linux so mplayer works just fine for me in that situation. But seeing as how most people use windows or mac, VLC is very easy to install and will play just about anything, it's kind of obvious why most people would use it.
No improvement of the 4870??
and I quote (from the summary):
"Long story short, the GeForce takes the cake with impressive performance at its price, while the Radeon didn't show a high improvement over the cheaper Radeon 4870."
Both articles say the same thing, the GeForce 275 is a better performer, and the 4890 isn't a much higher improvement over the 4870 (though it is still an improvement.)
Absolutely free text messages would result in people using them for everything, including massive file transfers. (hey, people use gmail as a storage drive. I can't wait for textmsg2avi to come out. :P )
I've had absolutely free text messaging for a few years now, I'm fairly certain every carrier offers it as an option unless maybe you're on a prepaid plan or something (though they could also offer unlimited texting, I'm not sure as I never had a prepaid plan.)
"Time was that there was little cooler than an SGI workstation."
My head hurts trying to parse that sentence. Is there some grammatical rule that I don't fully understand or was that just a mistake in the summary?
I kind of understand it to mean -
"There was a time when there was little cooler than an SGI workstation."
Though I could be wrong.
Trying to get it, haven't figured it out yet...
Maybe I have to post in this article?
Eh, the achievement system will be gone soon anyways...
This isn't an April Fools joke.
That was the parent's point.
"We need to keep this site as useless as possible today. You're not helping."
"Legitimate news?" wasn't questioning the legitimacy of the article, it was questioning why there was legitimate news today.
I really thought there was going to be something special here, that the ancient Egyptians found some way to preserve data better we do now in modern society.
Does the author not realize that he's only looking at a rock that survived, and not one of the millions of rocks that turned to dust over the years?
If someone in 5,000 years finds a USB flash drive exhibit in some park with the data still readable off the device, that will not be proof that USB flash storage is the ultimate in storage technology, it'll only prove that that one USB flash drive lasted for 5,000 years.
There's a company in my office building (http://www.rpi.edu/dept/incubator/homepage/ethermetrics.html) that's doing something similar, except they have a device much smaller, that plugs into your power meter and gives the reading for the whole house.
It uses little to no power but requires an ethernet cable to get online. It's got a built in web server and you can log in to check your power usage. They don't have much of a website yet though they've got a working prototype and I'd definitely get one for my own house (it'd be nice to know my own power usage stats.)
FTA: "Some of them we tossed carelessly aside. (Adios, Windows Me!)"
I took great care in building a trebuchet capable of tossing Windows Me far enough from in order to keep it from further damaging my poor, unsuspecting PC.
6. "Although this proposal, and the people behind it, are certifiable, the idea that a theory of evolution holds some special uncriticizable position because of the 'preponderance of evidence' is just as stifling to scientific progress as the dogmatic fervor with which academia held to Newton's theory of gravitation. A theory should always be accepted as necessarily conjectural, and all efforts should be made to falsify the accepted 'best' theory and replace it with a better theory." -Me
So let me get this straight, you think we should entertain the idea of replacing the theory of evolution with the theory that the earth is only 10,000 years old and life came about in it's current form by way of a "magic man"?
How do you go about testing the "magic man" theory?
(I'm not saying you support the "magic man" theory in any way, I somewhat get your point. It's just that they don't want to replace the theory of evolution with a better theory, they want to replace it with "magic".)
How does cloud computing solve the CPU-GPU bandwidth issues of modern games? Gamers still want to see the game, and at ultra high rez & IQ.
I'd imagine it does all of the CPU-GPU processing off-site, so essentially your video game is just a streaming video that you can control. The quality won't be nearly as good.
I think this technology is rather pointless, my computer was mid-level 3 years ago and it still plays the newest games just fine. If the person saved that $50 a year and just upgraded their video card every 4 years they'd be fine. They could even buy a used version of what was the "latest and greatest" or with SLI buy a second video card (at a much lower price than the first.)