$40 doesn't buy you a guarenteed 6 mbit connection 24/7. If you have a problem with the way they sell their bandwidth, send them a complaint to lower their cap so you can't burst to higher speeds. If you want a legit 6 mbits per second 24/7 for yourself, go buy 1/8th of a T3. Just one problem: splitting a T3 8 ways is gonna cost QUITE A BIT MORE than $40 a month.
What comcast is doing is screwed up (the exact way they're killing bittorrent traffic) but the only reason they can sell you a "6mbit connection" for $40-$50 a month under the current system is the assumption that you're, like most web browsers, not using it more than about 10% of the time. They could charge less, but that wouldn't fund their system upgrades without everybody in their company taking a pay cut (whether their CEO deserves to make however much he does or not is a whole different story).
So the options are: Complain until they price the service for 24/7 operation, complain until they lower the quality of the service to what they can afford to sell for $40 a month and guarentee 24/7 bandwidth, or just accept that $40 a month doesn't get you a guarenteed 1900 gigabytes of traffic per month. Yes, 1.9 terabytes. There is a reason (a multitude of reasons actually) why 45 mbits on a T3 line costs a LOT MORE than $300 when 6 mbits on a cable line costs "only $40-$50." Yes, comcast sucks. No, broadband providers can't realistically be expected to cater to the Homer Simpsons sort that would sue an all you can eat buffet for kicking him out after consuming every bit of food in the establishment. You're paying for a connection that is unlimited with connection time, but its NATURALLY limited with respect to data speed/total data transferrable in a month/number of customers sharing your coax loop.
Mod parent up! I didn't previously think of this, but TWC may be doing this precisely to make bandwidth hogs go slow down their competitor's network instead of their own.
But the recording time of initial beta tapes only an hour vs VHS's two hours. This wasn't enough for a whole movie, so movie studios jumped on VHS. EVENTUALLY they made it do 2 hour movies but VHS got a good enough head start that it didn't matter.
Also, while I've never seen a betamax tape myself, the quality has been compared to Video8 (i.e. what sony camcorders used before they used Hi8/digital8). I've seen plenty of Video8 recordings, and I'd call it "a slightly more stable picture" than VHS but otherwise in the same ball field. Hi8 is really quite a bit better, but thats better than S-VHS too.
People make this mistake all the time. DVDs are "480i" in exactly the same way that HD-DVD and whatnot is "1080i". If you want to compare apples to apples, they're either both interlaced or both progressive depending on how you look at it. The trick is that both formats store movies at 480p24 or 1080p24, and then add 3:2 pulldown at playback to make 480i60 or 1080i60. Since this conversion is lossless (its just a matter of repeating fields to make the right frame rate), you can take that 480/1080i signal and convert it back to 1080p60 or 1080p24 or whatever. It works the same no matter what resolution you're starting with.
You have the space to sit 34 feet away from your 204" screen?
Or do your guests leave with vertigo?
No offense, but sometimes I see people building huge home theater systems and then they put a single recliner way too close and sit and watch movies by themselves. Just because a projector allows you to build a screen thats (almost) arbitrarily large doesn't mean bigger is always better.
In reality, screens bigger than 60 inches or so are for allowing you to put more seating farther away. If you regularly have 30 people over to watch movies, a screen that big makes sense. But otherwise... eh.
Its not entrapment when the person committing a crime does so with almost no hesitation. It only becomes entrapment when the enforcement officer has to actually convince the person to commit the crime.
Examples:
"You wanna buy some crack?"
"Sure."
That wouldn't be entrapment.
The next example is a bit ridiculous but its obviously entrapment. If a law enforcement agent did this, they would be in serious trouble.
"You wanna buy some crack?"
"No."
"But its so good, buy some crack"
"NO!"
"Ok i'm putting these handcuffs on you and I'm not taking them off until you buy some crack!"
You know, in reality it would pretty much be an open and shut case against the person who ran the red light and t-boned/rear ended the person who was driving the speed limit, no matter how riced out either car is. Getting hit in the side or the rear is pretty much always going to be a win for the person who got hit, no matter what the circumstances are.
Nope. If it reported that they COULD "slow down time" then it would be quite an interesting discovery. The issue I have is that it was worded in the format:
"Does [some unusual event that you'd initially assume can't happen] occur? Study says: No. No it didn't."
Can dogs fly planes? I'll research that tomorrow and report the answer back. I'm sure you'll be waiting here for the answer.
Walking away from the nozzle would be "being sloppy."
Don't take your hand off the pump when you're filling it, for reasons as you have already discovered.
Most gas stations around here don't have the hands-free lock on the pump, so you HAVE to keep your hand on it. If you jam your gas cap in the pump, its just too easy to spill the gas.
As outlined above, its harder than you'd think to ignite the vapors with the overhead vapor recovery system, but its NOT hard to ignite a "puddle of gas on the ground."
The odds of blowing up are pretty low, but you don't really want to risk it just so you can save a minute washing the windshield while you fill up.
Lesson: Valve is the company that makes Half Life. Steam is the method they use to distribute it. Sierra is the company that originally published Half Life 1 but has had nothing to do with it at all since then.
"No one is forcing Valve throw shit ton of money to make a game. No one is required help Valve profit from such a game despite how much money they pumped at it. If other companies do it, it isn't an excuse for Valve to do the same."
If you appreciate good quality video games, you won't be a cheapskate when contributing to the salaries of the people who make games you enjoy.
You don't HAVE TO appreciate complicated video games with high production values and high production costs, but don't complain when the video game market starts seeing a lot fewer "Half Lifes" and a lot more "Peggles." Personally, I would not look forward to a world where people are so cheap that they wouldn't dare fund the production of any game with more depth than a simple puzzle game.
I'm not sure if I actually mentioned the idea of the cheap version being a "welfare version" in my post, but it has crossed my mind and other people have definitely suggested it. If I DID explain it like that, I'd like to update what I've said and point out that the cheap version is mostly to compete with piracy, which is far more rampant in some countries. Its not REALLY charity though I did have that thought in my head for a little while.
The most important point though, is that what Valve is doing is ACTUALLY NOT ILLEGAL AT THE MOMENT. If you wish to write your congressman so that they do make it illegal, you are welcome to and I understand the basis for your complaint. The end result of legislating this to be illegal is that Valve simply will not offer an export only option and there will be no cheap version for you to export->import. Everybody will pay full price because Valve has no legitimate way to price local and export copies differently.
If you're worried about the right to buy a cheap overseas copy, that opportunity will vanish if you complain loudly enough to the right people.
If you're worried that people got locked out of "something they paid for" then your anger is not misplaced, but the only solution is that the opportunity to pay less for a copy that goes US->Thailand->US will disappear. If this is ok with you, its ok with me.
I said if you like valve games you should pay what they're asking. That way they can fund the development of future games, instead of going out of business. There is no legal requirement to do so, its called financially supporting businesses that provide you with entertainment you enjoy. In short, "Being a cheapskate only puts you ahead in the short term."
Would you go to a museum with a suggested donation of $10 per person and then laugh at them and say "haha, suckers, we don't have to pay ANYTHING if we don't feel like it." (Note: Homer Simpson already tried this. Yes he looked like an ass.) I mean, maybe YOU WOULD and thats within your legal right if its a "suggested" donation, but suggestions don't pay the bills.
The issue is, if Valve can't be allowed to technologically enforce multiple market-specific pricing, then they're not going to sell it in the markets that can't afford to pay American-market prices. Bitching about it merely means that the people in Thailand don't get to buy an affordable version.
Demanding the right to buy and play a "for export only" copy just means that there won't be any "for export only" version next time. Short sightedness FTW!
I suspect people are screaming bloody murder because they didn't read the article (Cue: You must be new here jokes).
Heres what it comes down to. Video games cost a shit ton of money to make. Generally games get sold around $50 in the US so it doesn't take forever for developers to recoup their costs. Hopefully we can agree that $50 is a reasonable price for a package of 3 kickass games and 2 you probably already played but can "give away" if you do already have them. After all, if you played episodes 1 and 2, chances are you wanna find out what happens in episode 3, and money doesn't grow on trees so valve has to charge you to continue development. Anyway, this point is minor but basically if you like their games, you should probably pay what they're asking instead of hunting around for cheap overseas copies.
Now to make back the money on the development, they had a few options. They could sell it for $50 everywhere, including countries that have significantly less disposable income and can't realistically afford to be spending their local equivalent of $50 on video games. They'll get all the people willing to spend $50 on it in the US, but they lose out on the people in poorer markets that either won't or can't spend more than $15 on it.
Or, they could sell it for $15 everywhere, so they sell a maximum number of copies but won't make as much money per copy. In fact they'd probably make less money overall, since there were certainly a large number of people willing to spend $50 on the "not-region-locked" US copy.
They took option #3. Sell it for a price the market will bear in all markets, but restrict the usage of the cheapest market copies to those markets. This means it gets sold for $50 in the US and anybody who pays the full price can play it anywhere, and it gets sold for $15 or whatever in the countries with lower market values for video games. You guys are screaming bloody murder over this for some reason. All this means is that in countries like Thailand people still get to buy entertainment, but they don't have to spend such a large portion of their income on it, and valve makes a little bit extra money with the long end of the tail. The boxes were (apparently) clearly labeled with a note that those cheap oversea copies will only work in their respective countries. So the problem lies with the middlemen failing to relay this note that the cheap thai copies will NOT work in the US.
If you continue to bitch about this and raise a stink, all that means is that next time, there will be no $15 overseas copy. The people screaming about getting locked out of a game advertised to not work in their territory will just have to pay $50 for the steam version or buy it in their local retail store for whatever price its going for. Or wait till they drop the price, which they always do.
I understand the problem with locking people out of a game they purchased. Except, in this case, the terms of the lockout were stated on the box's exterior and not jumbled up in legalese in a 500 page EULA. So, it was really the buyer's fault for going through unusual channels in the hopes of getting a "good deal" and instead getting a copy not intended for use outside of a certain region.
If you want game makers to continue making games that you like to play, pay the amount of money they're asking in the area you live in. By buying what practically works out to be "charity copies" of a game, you're giving them less money to develop episode 3. If you don't care about their games, obviously you don't have to pay them anything. But if you like them and want them to go on and continue adding maps to TF2 and Portal, you gotta fund that development somehow. Modern video game development, unlike modern music recording, is far too expensive to work on the "pay what you feel like" system. Pay what the game companies are asking for, or don't be disappointed when their game quality slides because they have less money to spend on talent.
You're describing the skin effect (signal mostly flows over the surface atoms) and it only happens at frequencies significantly greater than audible. I.e. 1mhz and up. At 20khz, the current uses something like 99% of the depth of the cable.
Stranded vs solid is just a matter of mechanical reliability/flexibility.
There are in fact two relevant contrast ratios to consider. One is the ratio between the brightest white it can display in a full screen and the darkest black it can display full screen. The other is the ratio between the white and black when both are displayed simultaneously.
What people don't realize (because CRTs typically don't include contrast specs) is that while a CRT can achieve ~15,000:1 dynamic contrast (i.e. the ratio between an all white and an all black screen), the reality is when you put both black and white together, one washes the other one out. CRTs, in actuality, can't do much more than about 500:1 contrast.
The key point is that dynamic contrast is not a bullshit marketing term. The reason CRTs have apparently great black levels is because their dynamic contrast is much higher than that of LCD screens. An LCD with a panel contrast of 1000:1 and no other backlight tricks will have a dynamic contrast of 1000:1. Thats why in bright-overall scenes, it looks GREAT, but in dark scenes it washes out. In bright scenes on an LCD vs a CRT, you're basically comparing ansi contrast to ansi contrast, and LCD can get ~1000:1 with no washout. A CRT can't. In dark screens, an LCD can't make quite as dark blacks, so you're now comparing dynamic vs dynamic contrast. The CRT could pull in 15,000:1, but the LCD is still stuck at 1,000:1.
Current displays improve this by varying the intensity of the light source, then stretching the brightness of an average-dark image to maintain the full panel contrast. That way, you can get the full ansi contrast over a wider range of actual brightness values. It looks like current LCD monitors vary the black light to increase dynamic contrast from 1000:1 to 3000:1, and LCD projectors can open and close an aperture in the lens to jack dynamic contrast up to 10,000:1.
The point is, there are two types of contrast. LCD beats the crap out of CRT in one type, but CRT beats the crap out of LCD in the other type. Neither specs are marketing BS, and you need to know both to understand how contrasty a screen will look in practice.
I just think that in general, modding down should be reserved for obvious abuses of the posting system. When I read the exact same obvious sentiment 4 times and somebody still bothers to post the same sentiment a 5th time, that would probably warrant a "redundant" mod. And obviously GNAA type crap should get dropped to -1. But, a first post shouldn't EVER be modded redundant... and if its not flagrantly offensive it probably shouldn't be modded down at all. The right thing to do is nothing at all... don't mod it up, don't mod it down, just leave it at 1 or 2 or whatever. No reason to penalize somebody just because their observation wasn't earth-shattering.
Ray Beckerman has the first post on a legal topic and it gets modded down as redundant? It may not be insightful enough to warrant being modded up... but modding an early post by an expert on the subject as redundant is just stupid. Good thing for metamodding.
To make this comment not a gripe in whole, it does seem quite possible that the RIAA could avoid the trial by jury silver bullet in this case, if the defendant was in fact file sharing and they have "good" proof. Not all the defendants are dead, children, or too old to own/know how to use a computer.
Still, the writing is on the wall. They won't get away with extortion forever.
"I've been wanting an upscaling DVD player, anyway,"
Either your TV doesn't need to scale the image (because its a 480i CRT) or it MUST be scaled to the native res (because its an LCD). An unscaled image on an LCD would have black bars around the outside and it would be the wrong pixel ratio.
Since scaling must occur somewhere, it either happens in the TV or the DVD player. The only way an upscaling DVD player can be "better" than just plugging 480i from your DVD player to your TV is if the TV's built in hardware is inferior to your hypothetical $60 DVD player.
Say your screen is 1366x768, as many LCDs are. DVDs are 720x480, but the standard hi def formats are 1280x720 and 1920x1080. Since no tv format is exactly 1366x768, all inputs must be scaled no matter what it is. A good TV will do a good job of this and won't be beat by a "$60" external DVD player. A crappy TV shouldn't have been purchased, so who cares if a $60 DVD player's scaler beats it?
The exact same argument is used for laserdisc players and their comb filter. Laserdiscs store composite video which must be run through a comb filter SOMEWHERE in order to (eventually) turn it into RGB. New, high quality TVs have better comb filters than any laserdisc player could have, so usually its BETTER to run composite out than s-video.
Steam existed long before HL2 came out. But I don't think it was before Nov 2002 (more like early 2003). Your point still stands, its just that Steam wasn't initially released with HL2.
I'm psyched about Team Fortress 2. All the exploiting retards (yes, bunnyhopping is an exploit, you CAN'T tell me an absurd speed acceleration "trick" that requires you to jump around like an idiot was intentionally designed into the game) will continue to exploit in their ancient version of TFC, while I can play a non-exploiting round of TF in TF2. If you want to be good at an FPS, be good by aiming more accurately and having quicker reflexes than your enemies, and in TF's case, mastering each class. Don't beat up on everybody by practicing an ancient (it dates back to quake 1) physics bug that pretty much can't be fixed without breaking the game or coming up with a new game engine.
After all, just because it makes the game more fun for you doesn't mean it makes it more fun for everyone else who is playing. And just because it takes practice to exploit doesn't mean its still the "proper" way of playing the game. Sure, athletes that take steroids still have to work on their strength and skills... but its still not fair to the people who understand that steroids/exploiting makes the game into an unfun excercise.
Slashdot Mirror
$40 doesn't buy you a guarenteed 6 mbit connection 24/7. If you have a problem with the way they sell their bandwidth, send them a complaint to lower their cap so you can't burst to higher speeds. If you want a legit 6 mbits per second 24/7 for yourself, go buy 1/8th of a T3. Just one problem: splitting a T3 8 ways is gonna cost QUITE A BIT MORE than $40 a month.
What comcast is doing is screwed up (the exact way they're killing bittorrent traffic) but the only reason they can sell you a "6mbit connection" for $40-$50 a month under the current system is the assumption that you're, like most web browsers, not using it more than about 10% of the time. They could charge less, but that wouldn't fund their system upgrades without everybody in their company taking a pay cut (whether their CEO deserves to make however much he does or not is a whole different story).
So the options are: Complain until they price the service for 24/7 operation, complain until they lower the quality of the service to what they can afford to sell for $40 a month and guarentee 24/7 bandwidth, or just accept that $40 a month doesn't get you a guarenteed 1900 gigabytes of traffic per month. Yes, 1.9 terabytes. There is a reason (a multitude of reasons actually) why 45 mbits on a T3 line costs a LOT MORE than $300 when 6 mbits on a cable line costs "only $40-$50." Yes, comcast sucks. No, broadband providers can't realistically be expected to cater to the Homer Simpsons sort that would sue an all you can eat buffet for kicking him out after consuming every bit of food in the establishment. You're paying for a connection that is unlimited with connection time, but its NATURALLY limited with respect to data speed/total data transferrable in a month/number of customers sharing your coax loop.
Mod parent up! I didn't previously think of this, but TWC may be doing this precisely to make bandwidth hogs go slow down their competitor's network instead of their own.
But the recording time of initial beta tapes only an hour vs VHS's two hours. This wasn't enough for a whole movie, so movie studios jumped on VHS. EVENTUALLY they made it do 2 hour movies but VHS got a good enough head start that it didn't matter.
Also, while I've never seen a betamax tape myself, the quality has been compared to Video8 (i.e. what sony camcorders used before they used Hi8/digital8). I've seen plenty of Video8 recordings, and I'd call it "a slightly more stable picture" than VHS but otherwise in the same ball field. Hi8 is really quite a bit better, but thats better than S-VHS too.
People make this mistake all the time. DVDs are "480i" in exactly the same way that HD-DVD and whatnot is "1080i". If you want to compare apples to apples, they're either both interlaced or both progressive depending on how you look at it. The trick is that both formats store movies at 480p24 or 1080p24, and then add 3:2 pulldown at playback to make 480i60 or 1080i60. Since this conversion is lossless (its just a matter of repeating fields to make the right frame rate), you can take that 480/1080i signal and convert it back to 1080p60 or 1080p24 or whatever. It works the same no matter what resolution you're starting with.
You have the space to sit 34 feet away from your 204" screen?
Or do your guests leave with vertigo?
No offense, but sometimes I see people building huge home theater systems and then they put a single recliner way too close and sit and watch movies by themselves. Just because a projector allows you to build a screen thats (almost) arbitrarily large doesn't mean bigger is always better.
In reality, screens bigger than 60 inches or so are for allowing you to put more seating farther away. If you regularly have 30 people over to watch movies, a screen that big makes sense. But otherwise... eh.
Its not entrapment when the person committing a crime does so with almost no hesitation. It only becomes entrapment when the enforcement officer has to actually convince the person to commit the crime.
Examples:
"You wanna buy some crack?"
"Sure."
That wouldn't be entrapment.
The next example is a bit ridiculous but its obviously entrapment. If a law enforcement agent did this, they would be in serious trouble.
"You wanna buy some crack?"
"No."
"But its so good, buy some crack"
"NO!"
"Ok i'm putting these handcuffs on you and I'm not taking them off until you buy some crack!"
"Heres some freakin money now let me go!"
You know, in reality it would pretty much be an open and shut case against the person who ran the red light and t-boned/rear ended the person who was driving the speed limit, no matter how riced out either car is. Getting hit in the side or the rear is pretty much always going to be a win for the person who got hit, no matter what the circumstances are.
Nope. If it reported that they COULD "slow down time" then it would be quite an interesting discovery. The issue I have is that it was worded in the format:
"Does [some unusual event that you'd initially assume can't happen] occur? Study says: No. No it didn't."
Can dogs fly planes? I'll research that tomorrow and report the answer back. I'm sure you'll be waiting here for the answer.
First on today's news: Time doesn't slow down for non-relativistic cases.
And in other news: Water is wet.
Film reel at 11.
Walking away from the nozzle would be "being sloppy."
Don't take your hand off the pump when you're filling it, for reasons as you have already discovered.
Most gas stations around here don't have the hands-free lock on the pump, so you HAVE to keep your hand on it. If you jam your gas cap in the pump, its just too easy to spill the gas.
As outlined above, its harder than you'd think to ignite the vapors with the overhead vapor recovery system, but its NOT hard to ignite a "puddle of gas on the ground."
The odds of blowing up are pretty low, but you don't really want to risk it just so you can save a minute washing the windshield while you fill up.
Lesson: Valve is the company that makes Half Life. Steam is the method they use to distribute it. Sierra is the company that originally published Half Life 1 but has had nothing to do with it at all since then.
"No one is forcing Valve throw shit ton of money to make a game. No one is required help Valve profit from such a game despite how much money they pumped at it. If other companies do it, it isn't an excuse for Valve to do the same."
If you appreciate good quality video games, you won't be a cheapskate when contributing to the salaries of the people who make games you enjoy.
You don't HAVE TO appreciate complicated video games with high production values and high production costs, but don't complain when the video game market starts seeing a lot fewer "Half Lifes" and a lot more "Peggles." Personally, I would not look forward to a world where people are so cheap that they wouldn't dare fund the production of any game with more depth than a simple puzzle game.
I'm not sure if I actually mentioned the idea of the cheap version being a "welfare version" in my post, but it has crossed my mind and other people have definitely suggested it. If I DID explain it like that, I'd like to update what I've said and point out that the cheap version is mostly to compete with piracy, which is far more rampant in some countries. Its not REALLY charity though I did have that thought in my head for a little while.
The most important point though, is that what Valve is doing is ACTUALLY NOT ILLEGAL AT THE MOMENT. If you wish to write your congressman so that they do make it illegal, you are welcome to and I understand the basis for your complaint. The end result of legislating this to be illegal is that Valve simply will not offer an export only option and there will be no cheap version for you to export->import. Everybody will pay full price because Valve has no legitimate way to price local and export copies differently.
If you're worried about the right to buy a cheap overseas copy, that opportunity will vanish if you complain loudly enough to the right people.
If you're worried that people got locked out of "something they paid for" then your anger is not misplaced, but the only solution is that the opportunity to pay less for a copy that goes US->Thailand->US will disappear. If this is ok with you, its ok with me.
Way to quote (and then respond) out of context.
I said if you like valve games you should pay what they're asking. That way they can fund the development of future games, instead of going out of business. There is no legal requirement to do so, its called financially supporting businesses that provide you with entertainment you enjoy. In short, "Being a cheapskate only puts you ahead in the short term."
Would you go to a museum with a suggested donation of $10 per person and then laugh at them and say "haha, suckers, we don't have to pay ANYTHING if we don't feel like it." (Note: Homer Simpson already tried this. Yes he looked like an ass.) I mean, maybe YOU WOULD and thats within your legal right if its a "suggested" donation, but suggestions don't pay the bills.
The issue is, if Valve can't be allowed to technologically enforce multiple market-specific pricing, then they're not going to sell it in the markets that can't afford to pay American-market prices. Bitching about it merely means that the people in Thailand don't get to buy an affordable version.
Demanding the right to buy and play a "for export only" copy just means that there won't be any "for export only" version next time. Short sightedness FTW!
This story and the one that came from it = fail.
I suspect people are screaming bloody murder because they didn't read the article (Cue: You must be new here jokes).
Heres what it comes down to. Video games cost a shit ton of money to make. Generally games get sold around $50 in the US so it doesn't take forever for developers to recoup their costs. Hopefully we can agree that $50 is a reasonable price for a package of 3 kickass games and 2 you probably already played but can "give away" if you do already have them. After all, if you played episodes 1 and 2, chances are you wanna find out what happens in episode 3, and money doesn't grow on trees so valve has to charge you to continue development. Anyway, this point is minor but basically if you like their games, you should probably pay what they're asking instead of hunting around for cheap overseas copies.
Now to make back the money on the development, they had a few options. They could sell it for $50 everywhere, including countries that have significantly less disposable income and can't realistically afford to be spending their local equivalent of $50 on video games. They'll get all the people willing to spend $50 on it in the US, but they lose out on the people in poorer markets that either won't or can't spend more than $15 on it.
Or, they could sell it for $15 everywhere, so they sell a maximum number of copies but won't make as much money per copy. In fact they'd probably make less money overall, since there were certainly a large number of people willing to spend $50 on the "not-region-locked" US copy.
They took option #3. Sell it for a price the market will bear in all markets, but restrict the usage of the cheapest market copies to those markets. This means it gets sold for $50 in the US and anybody who pays the full price can play it anywhere, and it gets sold for $15 or whatever in the countries with lower market values for video games. You guys are screaming bloody murder over this for some reason. All this means is that in countries like Thailand people still get to buy entertainment, but they don't have to spend such a large portion of their income on it, and valve makes a little bit extra money with the long end of the tail. The boxes were (apparently) clearly labeled with a note that those cheap oversea copies will only work in their respective countries. So the problem lies with the middlemen failing to relay this note that the cheap thai copies will NOT work in the US.
If you continue to bitch about this and raise a stink, all that means is that next time, there will be no $15 overseas copy. The people screaming about getting locked out of a game advertised to not work in their territory will just have to pay $50 for the steam version or buy it in their local retail store for whatever price its going for. Or wait till they drop the price, which they always do.
I understand the problem with locking people out of a game they purchased. Except, in this case, the terms of the lockout were stated on the box's exterior and not jumbled up in legalese in a 500 page EULA. So, it was really the buyer's fault for going through unusual channels in the hopes of getting a "good deal" and instead getting a copy not intended for use outside of a certain region.
If you want game makers to continue making games that you like to play, pay the amount of money they're asking in the area you live in. By buying what practically works out to be "charity copies" of a game, you're giving them less money to develop episode 3. If you don't care about their games, obviously you don't have to pay them anything. But if you like them and want them to go on and continue adding maps to TF2 and Portal, you gotta fund that development somehow. Modern video game development, unlike modern music recording, is far too expensive to work on the "pay what you feel like" system. Pay what the game companies are asking for, or don't be disappointed when their game quality slides because they have less money to spend on talent.
3 = 3 9x = 4 2k/xp = 5 vista = 6 7 = 7 Nuff said.
You're describing the skin effect (signal mostly flows over the surface atoms) and it only happens at frequencies significantly greater than audible. I.e. 1mhz and up. At 20khz, the current uses something like 99% of the depth of the cable.
Stranded vs solid is just a matter of mechanical reliability/flexibility.
There are in fact two relevant contrast ratios to consider. One is the ratio between the brightest white it can display in a full screen and the darkest black it can display full screen. The other is the ratio between the white and black when both are displayed simultaneously.
What people don't realize (because CRTs typically don't include contrast specs) is that while a CRT can achieve ~15,000:1 dynamic contrast (i.e. the ratio between an all white and an all black screen), the reality is when you put both black and white together, one washes the other one out. CRTs, in actuality, can't do much more than about 500:1 contrast.
The key point is that dynamic contrast is not a bullshit marketing term. The reason CRTs have apparently great black levels is because their dynamic contrast is much higher than that of LCD screens. An LCD with a panel contrast of 1000:1 and no other backlight tricks will have a dynamic contrast of 1000:1. Thats why in bright-overall scenes, it looks GREAT, but in dark scenes it washes out. In bright scenes on an LCD vs a CRT, you're basically comparing ansi contrast to ansi contrast, and LCD can get ~1000:1 with no washout. A CRT can't. In dark screens, an LCD can't make quite as dark blacks, so you're now comparing dynamic vs dynamic contrast. The CRT could pull in 15,000:1, but the LCD is still stuck at 1,000:1.
Current displays improve this by varying the intensity of the light source, then stretching the brightness of an average-dark image to maintain the full panel contrast. That way, you can get the full ansi contrast over a wider range of actual brightness values. It looks like current LCD monitors vary the black light to increase dynamic contrast from 1000:1 to 3000:1, and LCD projectors can open and close an aperture in the lens to jack dynamic contrast up to 10,000:1.
The point is, there are two types of contrast. LCD beats the crap out of CRT in one type, but CRT beats the crap out of LCD in the other type. Neither specs are marketing BS, and you need to know both to understand how contrasty a screen will look in practice.
Or when you're in court, you could start talking about Chewbacca and how he was born on Kashyyyk but lives on Endor.
I just think that in general, modding down should be reserved for obvious abuses of the posting system. When I read the exact same obvious sentiment 4 times and somebody still bothers to post the same sentiment a 5th time, that would probably warrant a "redundant" mod. And obviously GNAA type crap should get dropped to -1. But, a first post shouldn't EVER be modded redundant... and if its not flagrantly offensive it probably shouldn't be modded down at all. The right thing to do is nothing at all... don't mod it up, don't mod it down, just leave it at 1 or 2 or whatever. No reason to penalize somebody just because their observation wasn't earth-shattering.
Ray Beckerman has the first post on a legal topic and it gets modded down as redundant? It may not be insightful enough to warrant being modded up... but modding an early post by an expert on the subject as redundant is just stupid. Good thing for metamodding.
To make this comment not a gripe in whole, it does seem quite possible that the RIAA could avoid the trial by jury silver bullet in this case, if the defendant was in fact file sharing and they have "good" proof. Not all the defendants are dead, children, or too old to own/know how to use a computer.
Still, the writing is on the wall. They won't get away with extortion forever.
"I've been wanting an upscaling DVD player, anyway,"
Either your TV doesn't need to scale the image (because its a 480i CRT) or it MUST be scaled to the native res (because its an LCD). An unscaled image on an LCD would have black bars around the outside and it would be the wrong pixel ratio.
Since scaling must occur somewhere, it either happens in the TV or the DVD player. The only way an upscaling DVD player can be "better" than just plugging 480i from your DVD player to your TV is if the TV's built in hardware is inferior to your hypothetical $60 DVD player.
Say your screen is 1366x768, as many LCDs are. DVDs are 720x480, but the standard hi def formats are 1280x720 and 1920x1080. Since no tv format is exactly 1366x768, all inputs must be scaled no matter what it is. A good TV will do a good job of this and won't be beat by a "$60" external DVD player. A crappy TV shouldn't have been purchased, so who cares if a $60 DVD player's scaler beats it?
The exact same argument is used for laserdisc players and their comb filter. Laserdiscs store composite video which must be run through a comb filter SOMEWHERE in order to (eventually) turn it into RGB. New, high quality TVs have better comb filters than any laserdisc player could have, so usually its BETTER to run composite out than s-video.
Steam existed long before HL2 came out. But I don't think it was before Nov 2002 (more like early 2003). Your point still stands, its just that Steam wasn't initially released with HL2.
I'm psyched about Team Fortress 2. All the exploiting retards (yes, bunnyhopping is an exploit, you CAN'T tell me an absurd speed acceleration "trick" that requires you to jump around like an idiot was intentionally designed into the game) will continue to exploit in their ancient version of TFC, while I can play a non-exploiting round of TF in TF2. If you want to be good at an FPS, be good by aiming more accurately and having quicker reflexes than your enemies, and in TF's case, mastering each class. Don't beat up on everybody by practicing an ancient (it dates back to quake 1) physics bug that pretty much can't be fixed without breaking the game or coming up with a new game engine.
After all, just because it makes the game more fun for you doesn't mean it makes it more fun for everyone else who is playing. And just because it takes practice to exploit doesn't mean its still the "proper" way of playing the game. Sure, athletes that take steroids still have to work on their strength and skills... but its still not fair to the people who understand that steroids/exploiting makes the game into an unfun excercise.
If you're worried about getting the lowest possible price, why are you shopping at best buy ANYWAY?