Well, I do find it interesting how the media reports the result of offensive operations by quoting hospital doctors as getting "civilian" casualties. The problem with that is that the "bad guys" in Iraq do NOT wear uniform. They look JUST LIKE civillians.
I do not claim that the US Military is 100% fool proof. But, if a soldier shoots somebody, I would say that they most likely needed shooting. The doctor at an Iraq hospital just sees a dead guy. He was not there to see the guy pointing an AK47 or RPG at US soldiers. So, I always take those "civilian deaths" statements from Iraq with a block of salt.
He got away with it *both* times because the law emasculates the citizen from carrying a weapon at all times. If there were no restrictions on concealed carry, more people would carry. If V. Tech (like may schools) didn't ban firearms on its grounds, it's probable that some people in either group would have been armed and could have defended themselves.
Yes, the shooter was clearly out of his mind, and is to blame for the offense. However... we can blame the law for our collective lack of defense in situations like this.
Dude, chill. While I pretty much agree with you, now is not the time or place to be bringing it up. Let the wounds heal a little first. You can be completely correct, and still be a jerk.
Additionally, using SATA optical drives bypasses the worst offenders of CD based DRM like Starforce.
Huh? From what I understand, SATA (at least to software) looks almost exactly like IDE. The innards of a DVD drive should also look the same, except for the actual IDE interface. One of the driving forces behind SATA was to maintain backward-compatability, and to change as little as possible in order to make it easy to make changes to your design. How can going from PATA to SATA defeat copy protection?
Meh, it's only Word. Firefox goes down in flames every now and then, but it recovers at the spot it left off so no big deal. I guess the same thing is happening with Word. Annoying but no big deal.
It is all in attitude. This is not quite an end-of-the-world type bug, but if somebody goes "Oh. We will have to fix that one day soon," then that is acceptable. For somebody to say "that is the way we designed it, deal with it" is a cop-out and a sign of programmers (or marketing people) that don't really care.
It is sort of like slipping on a wet floor at a business. OK, you fell. But you will have a completely different opinion of the business if they say "Ooops. I'm sorry. Are you OK?" vs. "Ha ha. Look at you. Fall down, go boom."
You are right. It IS marketing propaganda. If you have 1.3MW of power used by CPU/motherboard/drives, you still have to remove 1.3MW if heat. Period. Using oil just lets you MOVE the heat easier (and quiter, and in less space), but that heat still has to go SOMEWHERE.
Of course, depending on the location, it might be easy enough to circulate the oil to cooling coils outside, but that still takes energy.
Given these guys obvious engineering expertise (not), I wonder if they have ever heard of Polyalphaolefin. Google "PAO cooling" for an idea. It is used for liquid cooling of electronics on military aircraft, and it seems very oil-like (at least when it spills). If it is good enough for the F-22, it is probably good enough for a web server.
In a way, George Lucas WAS the reason. He did not invent the space opera. But, he did make an awesome one -- one that, in a sense, defined what good sci-fi "should" be. It sort of became the gold standard of sci-fi movies and in Hollywood, it appears that screenplays are judged against that as a standard. If the script in question is another space opera, that that is acceptable. On the other hand, sci-fi movies that are not space operas may be judged as differing too much from the "Star Wars" archetype and canned as being too risky.
Of course I could be wrong about all of this. My perspective is that of a kid who was about eight years old when Star Wars came out. I am not in the movie industry. I am just a sci-fi fan from a young age.
I play my DS at home. In fact, 90% of all of my play is at home. It works great! Here are the plusses of this platform:
When my wife is watching a movie, I can still sit next to her on the sofa and still play. No retreating to the other room.
Because the DS "pauses" when the screen is closed, I can open it up for 5-10 minutes of an RPG. This is one of the biggest selling points. With a console, you have to play until you get to a "save point," or risk looking your progress, or you could just pause and leave it on for a few days until you have enough time to get back to it. With a busy day, sometimes it is not even worth it to fire up the console.
The DS is also by far the cheapest of the "current" gaming hardware. $130 for a DS. $200 for a PSP. Consoles are $250 on up.
DS is the best seller for much the same reason that Toyotas sell better than BMW.
It ain't about stopping people from buying the stuff. It is just about ratings. To me, the law just reads "We are going to give this game $rating. If there is something in this game that makes it require something more than $rating, you have to tell us." Really, that is all that there is to it. Not a big deal.
Ratings do NOT create censorship -- they just inform the consumer. It is sort of like complaining that food labels "censor" high-calorie fatty foods and create an underground market for twinkies.
Now, if certain retailers decide not to carry any "mature" ratings, that is up to the retailer. But there will always be places on the internet that you can order this stuff from. It is not like www.gogamer.com qualifies as an "underground."
Labeling movies as PG, R, X, etc. has not created and underground for movies. It just means that if you want "X", you go to a different store. Personally, I do not want a "teenage sluts" movie playing right next to "Bambi."
That's right, those components which fall under Moore's Law (the ram, the cpu, the flash) will just keep dropping in price.
Not really. Once the silicon gets very cheap, you will find that the cost of the packaging (plastic, pins, etc) will become as expensive as the silicon itself, if not more so. Also, you can only shrink the silicon down so far. The die still has to be big enough to put the pads on it. In this case, shrinking the transistors just means more unused silicon area. It will probably be more a case of being able to buy RAM for $3, or double the ram for $4 (just to pull numbers out of my rectal database).
Ummm, how about no more new keys for software players. As long as there are software players it seems obvious that it will be possible to reverse engineer what they are doing to shake out the keys. But if the industry decides that SW players are too weak, they simply revoke keys for them and don't issue new ones. The end of software players and the end of the risk.
Ummm, yeah. Everybody knows that geeks with lots of disposable income are the last ones to buy into new technologies. Kind of like shooting the goose that lays the golden eggs because it honks too much.
Of course, the solution could be "Vista only" on all software players. Ummm, wait. Geeks are also avoiding Vista cuz' of lousy frame rates.
Well, by the same token, if a person is at a child-porn web site, then they are not necessarily breaking the law -- they could be browsing with their browser set to not download images.
Technically, this COULD be true, but it is extremely unlikely.
I never understood how a blockbuster movie that took months to film on location with dozens if not hundreds of workers building sets, setting up special effects, holding cameras and microphones, and that have to pay big stars millions of dollars can be purchased for about $15.
On the other hand if you want the soundtrack from the movie, which took a dozen guys a week to make in a studio, it will cost you $17. Oh, and the artist probably make peanuts. The day the recording industry can explain this, I will start to buy more CD's.
but the iTunes store insists using a proprietary DRM that prevents playback on any device other than the iPod
Did you even RTFA? He addresses this. Since you appear to be "motivationally impared" (i.e. lazy), his argument is that DRM has to be kept secret in order to work. At the very least, the encryption key has to be kept secret, even if the algorithms were published (this last sentance is mine, not his). If the DRM is broken for a couple of weeks, the studios will take their ball and go home -- iTunes shuts down. So any breaks of DRM need to be pathed fast. Letting other companies means more eyes, more possible leaks, more software/firmware that has to be updated. In short, a logistical nightmare.
Face it, Apple needs the studios worse than the studios need Apple. Without music to sell, Apple is in a far worse position. Without Apple, the studios still have CD sales and Zune sales.
That falls into the "duh, why didn't I think of that?" category. That idea is just crazy enough to work! Of course, cost goes up, but that lens would be WAY cool! You, sir, deserved to be modded +10, genius.
I see two disadvantages, and both of them relate to the fact that the light-gathering surface is now a donut.
The first is that the light-gathering ability is greatly reduced when compared so something else with the same width lens. On the plus side, if you are "shortening" your lens, you probably do not mind "fattening it up" in order to compensate. This also means that the lens cover on your cell phone cam will be bigger, so you have a larger area to get scratched, a larger area to wipe fingerprints off of before shooting, etc. No big whoop, but something to be aware of.
The second is that blurry objects tend to blur in the shape of the aperature. The classic picture of this is taking a picture of your sweetie standing in front of a Christmas tree covered with white lights. With a conventional lens, if the Christmas lights are blurry, they will tend to be little fuzzy circles. With the new lens, they will be little glowing fuzzy donuts. So this is probably not what you want for portrait work.
Still pretty cool, though. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
I thought the same until I did a little measuring and a little math. Turns out it takes approximately a 37-inch 16:9 display to give you the same picture height to which you're accustomed with a 27-inch 4:3 display.
True enough, if you are watching 4:3 content. Almost all new content is 16:9. For that type of content, my new 30-inch LCD gives me MORE image area than a 32" CRT running with black bars on the top and bottom.
I just started watching LOTR on DVD (first time watching since the theaters), and even at 16:9, I still had black bars. I would imagine that I would throw away 50% of the screen real estate on a 4:3 CRT. Talk about eye strain!
Can anybody tell me where the savings are? I just moved out of Florida, a state where air conditioning is used ten months out of the year. When I lived there, it was easy. The bulbs used less electricity, and produced less heat, which was also a benefit.
I just moved to Colorado less than three months ago. It seems to me that the waste heat generated by an incandescent is actually a benefit. I know that using gas heat is more efficient than electric heat, but by having incandescent bulbs burning and generating heat, my furnace now has to work just a little less hard, somewhat offsetting the extra electricity usage.
even with random HTML spread around, it's a whole lot easier to analyze the text into a visible captch than doing OCR
This is still an image. Instead of sending a JPG or GIF, you are sending an actual bitmap in HTML. In my three-second preview, it just looks like a table with one-pixel cells. Then, you set the color of each cell (pixel) in HTML.
So, this still requires OCR, but there is just an extra obfuscation step in getting the image from HTML to a standard graphics format. The down side is that it is incredibly inefficient. Each pixel takes probably a dozen bytes or more (too lazy for an exact count right now).
Well, nobody else has commented, so let me throw in my $0.02 (about all that it is worth).
I do not own Vista, and I do not plan to ever own Vista, but what I have read is that this involves DRM. DRM just does not get put on media files by itself or by accident. If what you want to edit, you have in an unprotected format, then it will stay unprotected forever. You know that HD camcorders are coming out eventually, and M$ would be committing suicide if, all of a sudden, footage of Aunt Martha's 80th birthday party started playing back in low-rez.
Now, if what you planning on editing or re-mixing comes from commercial sources, you may have to look/wait for some cracks.
Next is a great idea. Also, try to find a BeBox. Those things were cutting-edge when they were released, and oh-so-cool. You gotta love something with an interface called the "Geek Port."
If you want to do any large amount of animations for a character the sprite approach leaves you with a lot of art work to churn out.
Huh? Let's look at this for a minute... Let's first of all assume that on staff there are a few talented artists. With a sprite-based approach, you have a guy using some sort of graphics program (photoshop, gimp, etc.) drawing a couple of dozen sprites. Somewhat time consuming, but it can be done in a day or so if the guy has a clear vision of how he wants the characters to look.
Now, with graphics, he has to handle the case of when everything is zoomed in, so there has to be detailed textures on everything. He had to deal with placing dozens, if not hundreds of polygons, making sure that the corners line up, and that everything looks good from every angle.
Look at the old SNES game, Donkey Kong Country. The graphics of the SNES could not really handle 3D, so they designed and rendered the entire game on a workstation and transferred rendered graphics to the SNED to be handled in a 2D fashion. Now, why did they do this? The simple answer is that they wanted it to look good. AFAIK, very few games did things that way. If 3D is both better looking AND easier to do, it would be the standard for every game made. I think that the reason that most side-scrollers did not use 3d-rendered graphis is because it is more labor intensive.
I also sometimes question the need for 3D for some genres. Can somebody please explain to me why 3D is needed for RPGs and adventures? For example, I consider the Fallout series to be the finest RPGs ever made, yet those used 2D graphics. Other games, such as Neverwinter, had full 3D graphics, yet did not really look appreciably better. The only read advantage is that you could zoom in if you wanted to. As far as adventure games, Day of the Tentacle stands out as one of the best, and that runs on a QVGA display!
I think that the reason that people use 3D is just because "it is there." and people expect it.
Well, he expected a little more out of Microsoft. All he got was a huge grope-fest where he got the whole "look how great this stuff is.." without ANSWERING ANY OF HIS HARD QUESTIONS...
What if you went to buy a new car, and tried to ask tough questions about horsepower, reliability, maintenance, but were just told to admire the shiny paint job and leather seats over and over again. Wouldn't you be rightly annoyed and walk out of there with an unfavorable opinion?
I think they could have looked a little harder for people "not friendly" to MS.
Yes, but even Microsoft could not afford to pay for a junket for every person who doesn't like them. I doubt that there are even enough hotel rooms in Washington.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I do find it interesting how the media reports the result of offensive operations by quoting hospital doctors as getting "civilian" casualties. The problem with that is that the "bad guys" in Iraq do NOT wear uniform. They look JUST LIKE civillians.
I do not claim that the US Military is 100% fool proof. But, if a soldier shoots somebody, I would say that they most likely needed shooting. The doctor at an Iraq hospital just sees a dead guy. He was not there to see the guy pointing an AK47 or RPG at US soldiers. So, I always take those "civilian deaths" statements from Iraq with a block of salt.
While I pretty much agree with you, now is not the time or place to be bringing it up. Let the wounds heal a little first. You can be completely correct, and still be a jerk.
- Computer games
- Music of some sort
- Lack of gun control
- Religion
- Lack of religion
- Educational system
- Lack of mental-health counseling
- If the person turns out to be an engineering student, expect blame to fall on H1B visas for providing too much competition for local engineers
- If the person turns out to be foreign, I can imagine a whole slew of others to blame
In short, blame everything/everybody except the person who did the deed. Personal responsibility is not even a concept in America any more.Huh? From what I understand, SATA (at least to software) looks almost exactly like IDE. The innards of a DVD drive should also look the same, except for the actual IDE interface. One of the driving forces behind SATA was to maintain backward-compatability, and to change as little as possible in order to make it easy to make changes to your design. How can going from PATA to SATA defeat copy protection?
It is sort of like slipping on a wet floor at a business. OK, you fell. But you will have a completely different opinion of the business if they say "Ooops. I'm sorry. Are you OK?" vs. "Ha ha. Look at you. Fall down, go boom."
You are right. It IS marketing propaganda. If you have 1.3MW of power used by CPU/motherboard/drives, you still have to remove 1.3MW if heat. Period. Using oil just lets you MOVE the heat easier (and quiter, and in less space), but that heat still has to go SOMEWHERE.
Of course, depending on the location, it might be easy enough to circulate the oil to cooling coils outside, but that still takes energy.
Given these guys obvious engineering expertise (not), I wonder if they have ever heard of Polyalphaolefin. Google "PAO cooling" for an idea. It is used for liquid cooling of electronics on military aircraft, and it seems very oil-like (at least when it spills). If it is good enough for the F-22, it is probably good enough for a web server.
In a way, George Lucas WAS the reason. He did not invent the space opera. But, he did make an awesome one -- one that, in a sense, defined what good sci-fi "should" be. It sort of became the gold standard of sci-fi movies and in Hollywood, it appears that screenplays are judged against that as a standard. If the script in question is another space opera, that that is acceptable. On the other hand, sci-fi movies that are not space operas may be judged as differing too much from the "Star Wars" archetype and canned as being too risky.
Of course I could be wrong about all of this. My perspective is that of a kid who was about eight years old when Star Wars came out. I am not in the movie industry. I am just a sci-fi fan from a young age.
I play my DS at home. In fact, 90% of all of my play is at home. It works great! Here are the plusses of this platform:
When my wife is watching a movie, I can still sit next to her on the sofa and still play. No retreating to the other room.
Because the DS "pauses" when the screen is closed, I can open it up for 5-10 minutes of an RPG. This is one of the biggest selling points. With a console, you have to play until you get to a "save point," or risk looking your progress, or you could just pause and leave it on for a few days until you have enough time to get back to it. With a busy day, sometimes it is not even worth it to fire up the console.
The DS is also by far the cheapest of the "current" gaming hardware. $130 for a DS. $200 for a PSP. Consoles are $250 on up.
DS is the best seller for much the same reason that Toyotas sell better than BMW.
It ain't about stopping people from buying the stuff. It is just about ratings. To me, the law just reads "We are going to give this game $rating. If there is something in this game that makes it require something more than $rating, you have to tell us." Really, that is all that there is to it. Not a big deal.
Ratings do NOT create censorship -- they just inform the consumer. It is sort of like complaining that food labels "censor" high-calorie fatty foods and create an underground market for twinkies.
Now, if certain retailers decide not to carry any "mature" ratings, that is up to the retailer. But there will always be places on the internet that you can order this stuff from. It is not like www.gogamer.com qualifies as an "underground."
Labeling movies as PG, R, X, etc. has not created and underground for movies. It just means that if you want "X", you go to a different store. Personally, I do not want a "teenage sluts" movie playing right next to "Bambi."
Of course, the solution could be "Vista only" on all software players. Ummm, wait. Geeks are also avoiding Vista cuz' of lousy frame rates.
Well, by the same token, if a person is at a child-porn web site, then they are not necessarily breaking the law -- they could be browsing with their browser set to not download images.
Technically, this COULD be true, but it is extremely unlikely.
I never understood how a blockbuster movie that took months to film on location with dozens if not hundreds of workers building sets, setting up special effects, holding cameras and microphones, and that have to pay big stars millions of dollars can be purchased for about $15.
On the other hand if you want the soundtrack from the movie, which took a dozen guys a week to make in a studio, it will cost you $17. Oh, and the artist probably make peanuts. The day the recording industry can explain this, I will start to buy more CD's.
Face it, Apple needs the studios worse than the studios need Apple. Without music to sell, Apple is in a far worse position. Without Apple, the studios still have CD sales and Zune sales.
That falls into the "duh, why didn't I think of that?" category. That idea is just crazy enough to work! Of course, cost goes up, but that lens would be WAY cool! You, sir, deserved to be modded +10, genius.
This looks pretty cool, but...
I see two disadvantages, and both of them relate to the fact that the light-gathering surface is now a donut.
The first is that the light-gathering ability is greatly reduced when compared so something else with the same width lens. On the plus side, if you are "shortening" your lens, you probably do not mind "fattening it up" in order to compensate. This also means that the lens cover on your cell phone cam will be bigger, so you have a larger area to get scratched, a larger area to wipe fingerprints off of before shooting, etc. No big whoop, but something to be aware of.
The second is that blurry objects tend to blur in the shape of the aperature. The classic picture of this is taking a picture of your sweetie standing in front of a Christmas tree covered with white lights. With a conventional lens, if the Christmas lights are blurry, they will tend to be little fuzzy circles. With the new lens, they will be little glowing fuzzy donuts. So this is probably not what you want for portrait work.
Still pretty cool, though. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
How else are you supposed to get XP raid drivers loaded?
BTW: Since availability is going to be short, everybody had better stock up now!
I just started watching LOTR on DVD (first time watching since the theaters), and even at 16:9, I still had black bars. I would imagine that I would throw away 50% of the screen real estate on a 4:3 CRT. Talk about eye strain!
Can anybody tell me where the savings are? I just moved out of Florida, a state where air conditioning is used ten months out of the year. When I lived there, it was easy. The bulbs used less electricity, and produced less heat, which was also a benefit.
I just moved to Colorado less than three months ago. It seems to me that the waste heat generated by an incandescent is actually a benefit. I know that using gas heat is more efficient than electric heat, but by having incandescent bulbs burning and generating heat, my furnace now has to work just a little less hard, somewhat offsetting the extra electricity usage.
Any comments?
So, this still requires OCR, but there is just an extra obfuscation step in getting the image from HTML to a standard graphics format. The down side is that it is incredibly inefficient. Each pixel takes probably a dozen bytes or more (too lazy for an exact count right now).
Well, nobody else has commented, so let me throw in my $0.02 (about all that it is worth).
I do not own Vista, and I do not plan to ever own Vista, but what I have read is that this involves DRM. DRM just does not get put on media files by itself or by accident. If what you want to edit, you have in an unprotected format, then it will stay unprotected forever. You know that HD camcorders are coming out eventually, and M$ would be committing suicide if, all of a sudden, footage of Aunt Martha's 80th birthday party started playing back in low-rez.
Now, if what you planning on editing or re-mixing comes from commercial sources, you may have to look/wait for some cracks.
Next is a great idea. Also, try to find a BeBox. Those things were cutting-edge when they were released, and oh-so-cool. You gotta love something with an interface called the "Geek Port."
Let's look at this for a minute... Let's first of all assume that on staff there are a few talented artists. With a sprite-based approach, you have a guy using some sort of graphics program (photoshop, gimp, etc.) drawing a couple of dozen sprites. Somewhat time consuming, but it can be done in a day or so if the guy has a clear vision of how he wants the characters to look.
Now, with graphics, he has to handle the case of when everything is zoomed in, so there has to be detailed textures on everything. He had to deal with placing dozens, if not hundreds of polygons, making sure that the corners line up, and that everything looks good from every angle.
Look at the old SNES game, Donkey Kong Country. The graphics of the SNES could not really handle 3D, so they designed and rendered the entire game on a workstation and transferred rendered graphics to the SNED to be handled in a 2D fashion. Now, why did they do this? The simple answer is that they wanted it to look good. AFAIK, very few games did things that way. If 3D is both better looking AND easier to do, it would be the standard for every game made. I think that the reason that most side-scrollers did not use 3d-rendered graphis is because it is more labor intensive.
I also sometimes question the need for 3D for some genres. Can somebody please explain to me why 3D is needed for RPGs and adventures? For example, I consider the Fallout series to be the finest RPGs ever made, yet those used 2D graphics. Other games, such as Neverwinter, had full 3D graphics, yet did not really look appreciably better. The only read advantage is that you could zoom in if you wanted to. As far as adventure games, Day of the Tentacle stands out as one of the best, and that runs on a QVGA display!
I think that the reason that people use 3D is just because "it is there." and people expect it.
Well, he expected a little more out of Microsoft. All he got was a huge grope-fest where he got the whole "look how great this stuff is.." without ANSWERING ANY OF HIS HARD QUESTIONS...
What if you went to buy a new car, and tried to ask tough questions about horsepower, reliability, maintenance, but were just told to admire the shiny paint job and leather seats over and over again. Wouldn't you be rightly annoyed and walk out of there with an unfavorable opinion?
Or, maybe you prefer snow jobs?