I don't just find CGI effects unimpressive, but fundamentally boring. They're good if they actually add to the story, but who cares if Keanu Reeves is fighting a raptor on top of a truck that's racing around the deck off a cruise liner that's going to explode if it goes below the speed of sound when it's all just created inside a computer? I could be impressed with effects in the pre-CG days when someone actually had to stand on top of a moving truck fighting a guy in a rubber dinoaur suit to achieve the same thing, but now, so what?
I'm disturbed why synch is "so hard". For whatever program you're using at a particular moment, it should be a snap to designate one active copy and X superseded copies. Then when another device with a superseded copy shows up, just synch it (or back-synch the Cloud copy, and with an advanced manual permission option).
Works great until you change the local copy on two different devices and then you suddenly have to merge the two. That may be easy when it's a text file, but it's not so easy when it's Proprietary Undocumented Binary Document Format X.
I've had a number of issues with Valve's 'Steam Cloud' save game storage, for example, where I was playing the game on multiple machines and it would decide that the save on machine X had been changed so it couldn't download the previous save for the game I'd been running on machine Y.
My current opinion is that the Cloud Services vendors actively work to squash localizing copies of their programs. For example, I don't yet know of an easy "Yahoo Mail Offline" app.
I believe it's called paying them $10 a year for IMAP access.
Nah, it's just that in every new generation of IT someone gets the idea that life would be wonderful if we all paid to rent mainframe time from them. And then after a few years we remember that mainframes sucked and go back to local processing for a few years until the next generation comes along.
Really? You actually trust Cloud Supplier X to a) be taking usable backups of your data and b) not decide to shut down your account and delete all your data?
Can we define it by what it isn't? Dwarf tossing & surfboarding elves for starters.
I might have managed to get beyond the first ninety pages of the LOTR books if they had dwarf tossing and surfboarding elves rather than tedious sixty-page interludes about elvish folk dancing every ten pages. If the movie was a direct translation of the books, the audience would have walked out two hours into the fifteen-hour-long first movie of the trilogy.
Actually, in that respect they are rather like the average modern game which has two minutes of actual gameplay followed by a twenty-minute unskippable cutscene where characters tell each other things you already know and repeat it six times just to make sure you know they know they know it.
In Mass Effect you make choices like whether or not to commit genocide to suit humanities war effort, or support a close friend's choice to murder someone. It's a little different.
And that difference is? In both cases you get to make artificial choices forced on you by the game designer; you don't get to make arbitrary choices like you do in real life, and none of them really matter.
BTW, I remember even Dr Who having to decide whether or not to commit genocide to eliminate the Daleks in the 1970s, _on a kids' SF show_. So claiming this is somehow 'adult' seems pretty funny.
Gaming went seriously downhill once designers decided 'oh, we've got to have a _story_'. That meant forcing the player onto rails they can't escape from other than a few pointless and arbitrary 'choices' of tihs kind, and adding numerous cut-scenes where their character does things the player would never do themselves, because the character must do those things to keep the player on the rails of the 'story'... Most modern game designers seem to be frustrated movie directors and from the cliched 'stories' they try to force onto the player and the sub-B-movie cut-scenes you can see exactly why the're just frustrated movie directors and not real ones.
I've always though ME was highly overrated but it isn't that bad.
Actually, I think the only way that you could do it as a movie would be as a Bruce Campbell parody. And half of it would be spent going up and down elevators.
My favorite part was when the aliens told me I was like the most bad-ass human ever and they'd let me in their secret alien club, and then I went down the elevator yet again and there was someone hanging around who wanted me, the most bad-ass human alive, to go and beat up some gangster.
'Woo-hoo, look at me, I'm the most bad-ass human alive and I'm in the secret alien club' 'Hello Bruce_01, if you beat up this gangster for me I'll give you this rusty ray gun I found in the garbage' 'WTF? Didn't you hear the news? The aliens just said I'm the most bad-ass human alive and let me into the secret alien club and you want me to beat up some stupid gangster? Would you like me to collect some rat tails while I'm at it?' 'Rat tails? That's the next quest!'
B-movie story, insanely long unskippable cut-scenes that don't even reach B-movie levels, elevators, elevators, elevators, and the same tired, tedious quest mechanic that we lifted from bad fantasy novels thirty years ago. Why would anyone want to watch this as a movie other than to make fun of it?
It's because there are idiots out there known as "libertarians" who believe that emasculating the government will solve everything. They are just as fucking wrong as utopian communists.
So _the government_ approves use of a pesticide that kills bees, and that's the fault of the EVIL FREE MARKET?
Of course that's assuming that this is actually the cause, and it won't turn out to be the same as the frogs that were supposedly being killed by EVIL FREE MARKET PESTICIDES until we later discovered it was probably an infectious disease instead.
I'll admit I don't know anything about Righthaven, had to look them up, but I'm wondering why they would ask for (or have any hope of getting) control of the web site?
Indeed. Since they're claiming that Drudge is a copyright violator, surely the US government should just steal his domain and hand it over to the lawyers without the hassle of a court case?
This is a solution in search of a problem. Hey, maybe they could use their fancy new searching thingy to find a problem it is good for.
If you'd watched enough sci-fi movies you'd realise that once you start the search engine searching itself steam starts coming out of the server and then it explodes just as the heroes escape.
There's lots of services I don't see the private industry ever overtaking from the public like courts,
Private arbitration is common where courts are too slow and inept.
police, CPS and so on.
Private security is (or was as of a few years ago) one of the fastest-growing businesses in the world because in most cases they provide a much better service than government police.
It's not people gaming a system, it's people being funny. It's not some evil corporation pimping it's uranium, it's people who think half life jokes and Back to the Future references are the hip new thing.
But the reviewer said that eating uranium ore for a month had caused him to grow three heads. I did the same and I still only have one head. I want my money back!
Re:Back in the day, there was 1600x1200
on
Goodbye, VGA
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· Score: 1
In the CRT era, PC display resolutions climbed to 1152x864 and 1600x1200.
More than that. My old CRT used to handle 2048x1536 from a VGA input.
Probably a bit late now, but that's a Zotac Ion motherboard in a small ITX case with some 'silent'-ish fans, 4GB of RAM and an X25-V SSD. It doesn't really need 4GB, but since it's running off a cheap SSD I wanted to push all temporary storage into a RAM disk to reduce SSD writes.
Not just mobile. Newer generations of HTPCs, Plug like devices are using 20W.
Yeah, I measured my MythTV frontend at 26W from the wall; so if the 4GB of RAM is taking 14W, that would be more than half the total consumption of the entire system.
If you need a speed limit of 45 when in REVERSE, I think you may be doing something wrong...
I believe most electric cars don't have a gearbox, so presumably they can go just as fast in reverse as forward, until aerodynamics stop them. So programming them to not go 80mph in reverse would probably be a good idea.
They relied on chains of custody and affidavits by the photographer, that's how.
And it was a fsckload harder to fake photographs in those days.
There was a news story in the UK a couple of years ago about someone who was taken to court and the photograph produced as evidence was proven to have been faked. I think it was a only a parking fine so probably faked by a private company or some council employee, but I forget the details.
I've got a remote control that works on every single TV out there. It's called congress.
Do you want to point to the part of the Constitutition which says 'Congress shall have the right to control TV volume levels'? Because I honestly can't find it.
No. It can’t. It has a sandbox that it plays in. If JS code breaks out of that, it’s a bug. It’s nothing more than ones and zeros arranged in a semi-human-readable fashion that tells an interpreter what to do. You are an interpreter too, but if I told you to go kill yourself, you wouldn’t. Same thing.
Duh, we're not talking about remote exploits running arbitrary machine code on your system. We're talking about Javascript being a privacy-stealing monster _BY DESIGN_.
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I don't just find CGI effects unimpressive, but fundamentally boring. They're good if they actually add to the story, but who cares if Keanu Reeves is fighting a raptor on top of a truck that's racing around the deck off a cruise liner that's going to explode if it goes below the speed of sound when it's all just created inside a computer? I could be impressed with effects in the pre-CG days when someone actually had to stand on top of a moving truck fighting a guy in a rubber dinoaur suit to achieve the same thing, but now, so what?
I'm disturbed why synch is "so hard". For whatever program you're using at a particular moment, it should be a snap to designate one active copy and X superseded copies. Then when another device with a superseded copy shows up, just synch it (or back-synch the Cloud copy, and with an advanced manual permission option).
Works great until you change the local copy on two different devices and then you suddenly have to merge the two. That may be easy when it's a text file, but it's not so easy when it's Proprietary Undocumented Binary Document Format X.
I've had a number of issues with Valve's 'Steam Cloud' save game storage, for example, where I was playing the game on multiple machines and it would decide that the save on machine X had been changed so it couldn't download the previous save for the game I'd been running on machine Y.
My current opinion is that the Cloud Services vendors actively work to squash localizing copies of their programs. For example, I don't yet know of an easy "Yahoo Mail Offline" app.
I believe it's called paying them $10 a year for IMAP access.
'Local processing good, remote processing bad' turning into 'Local processing good, remote processing better'?
Nah, it's just that in every new generation of IT someone gets the idea that life would be wonderful if we all paid to rent mainframe time from them. And then after a few years we remember that mainframes sucked and go back to local processing for a few years until the next generation comes along.
You don't need to have backups of your data
Really? You actually trust Cloud Supplier X to a) be taking usable backups of your data and b) not decide to shut down your account and delete all your data?
Good luck with that.
Can we define it by what it isn't? Dwarf tossing & surfboarding elves for starters.
I might have managed to get beyond the first ninety pages of the LOTR books if they had dwarf tossing and surfboarding elves rather than tedious sixty-page interludes about elvish folk dancing every ten pages. If the movie was a direct translation of the books, the audience would have walked out two hours into the fifteen-hour-long first movie of the trilogy.
Actually, in that respect they are rather like the average modern game which has two minutes of actual gameplay followed by a twenty-minute unskippable cutscene where characters tell each other things you already know and repeat it six times just to make sure you know they know they know it.
In Mass Effect you make choices like whether or not to commit genocide to suit humanities war effort, or support a close friend's choice to murder someone. It's a little different.
And that difference is? In both cases you get to make artificial choices forced on you by the game designer; you don't get to make arbitrary choices like you do in real life, and none of them really matter.
BTW, I remember even Dr Who having to decide whether or not to commit genocide to eliminate the Daleks in the 1970s, _on a kids' SF show_. So claiming this is somehow 'adult' seems pretty funny.
Gaming went seriously downhill once designers decided 'oh, we've got to have a _story_'. That meant forcing the player onto rails they can't escape from other than a few pointless and arbitrary 'choices' of tihs kind, and adding numerous cut-scenes where their character does things the player would never do themselves, because the character must do those things to keep the player on the rails of the 'story'... Most modern game designers seem to be frustrated movie directors and from the cliched 'stories' they try to force onto the player and the sub-B-movie cut-scenes you can see exactly why the're just frustrated movie directors and not real ones.
I've always though ME was highly overrated but it isn't that bad.
Actually, I think the only way that you could do it as a movie would be as a Bruce Campbell parody. And half of it would be spent going up and down elevators.
My favorite part was when the aliens told me I was like the most bad-ass human ever and they'd let me in their secret alien club, and then I went down the elevator yet again and there was someone hanging around who wanted me, the most bad-ass human alive, to go and beat up some gangster.
'Woo-hoo, look at me, I'm the most bad-ass human alive and I'm in the secret alien club'
'Hello Bruce_01, if you beat up this gangster for me I'll give you this rusty ray gun I found in the garbage'
'WTF? Didn't you hear the news? The aliens just said I'm the most bad-ass human alive and let me into the secret alien club and you want me to beat up some stupid gangster? Would you like me to collect some rat tails while I'm at it?'
'Rat tails? That's the next quest!'
B-movie story, insanely long unskippable cut-scenes that don't even reach B-movie levels, elevators, elevators, elevators, and the same tired, tedious quest mechanic that we lifted from bad fantasy novels thirty years ago. Why would anyone want to watch this as a movie other than to make fun of it?
It's because there are idiots out there known as "libertarians" who believe that emasculating the government will solve everything. They are just as fucking wrong as utopian communists.
So _the government_ approves use of a pesticide that kills bees, and that's the fault of the EVIL FREE MARKET?
Of course that's assuming that this is actually the cause, and it won't turn out to be the same as the frogs that were supposedly being killed by EVIL FREE MARKET PESTICIDES until we later discovered it was probably an infectious disease instead.
Though, to be fair, ME1's plot is pretty B-grade when you look at it closely...and this is coming from somebody who has played both games to excess.
Bingo. As a movie, Mass Effect would be at best a Sci-Fi channel B-movie with Bruce Campbell.
Yes. These should have been sorted out in Beta.
1.0 is the new Beta.
I'll admit I don't know anything about Righthaven, had to look them up, but I'm wondering why they would ask for (or have any hope of getting) control of the web site?
Indeed. Since they're claiming that Drudge is a copyright violator, surely the US government should just steal his domain and hand it over to the lawyers without the hassle of a court case?
This is a solution in search of a problem. Hey, maybe they could use their fancy new searching thingy to find a problem it is good for.
If you'd watched enough sci-fi movies you'd realise that once you start the search engine searching itself steam starts coming out of the server and then it explodes just as the heroes escape.
Amazon.com was screwed yesterday afternoon too. Or was that just all the Christmas shopping?
I heard some place called 'Wikileaks' was offering the government a good deal for cheap cloud hosting.
There's lots of services I don't see the private industry ever overtaking from the public like courts,
Private arbitration is common where courts are too slow and inept.
police, CPS and so on.
Private security is (or was as of a few years ago) one of the fastest-growing businesses in the world because in most cases they provide a much better service than government police.
No idea what 'CPS' is.
It's not people gaming a system, it's people being funny. It's not some evil corporation pimping it's uranium, it's people who think half life jokes and Back to the Future references are the hip new thing.
But the reviewer said that eating uranium ore for a month had caused him to grow three heads. I did the same and I still only have one head. I want my money back!
In the CRT era, PC display resolutions climbed to 1152x864 and 1600x1200.
More than that. My old CRT used to handle 2048x1536 from a VGA input.
Out of curiosity, what hardware are you using?
Probably a bit late now, but that's a Zotac Ion motherboard in a small ITX case with some 'silent'-ish fans, 4GB of RAM and an X25-V SSD. It doesn't really need 4GB, but since it's running off a cheap SSD I wanted to push all temporary storage into a RAM disk to reduce SSD writes.
Not just mobile. Newer generations of HTPCs, Plug like devices are using 20W.
Yeah, I measured my MythTV frontend at 26W from the wall; so if the 4GB of RAM is taking 14W, that would be more than half the total consumption of the entire system.
So what you're saying is, you're a giant asshole.
No, the tailgaters are assholes. I saw three cars wiped out by tailgating just a few days ago.
But this wouldn't really work as evidence of law-breaking, since anyone could pull in front of you and claim that you were following too close.
If you need a speed limit of 45 when in REVERSE, I think you may be doing something wrong...
I believe most electric cars don't have a gearbox, so presumably they can go just as fast in reverse as forward, until aerodynamics stop them. So programming them to not go 80mph in reverse would probably be a good idea.
They relied on chains of custody and affidavits by the photographer, that's how.
And it was a fsckload harder to fake photographs in those days.
There was a news story in the UK a couple of years ago about someone who was taken to court and the photograph produced as evidence was proven to have been faked. I think it was a only a parking fine so probably faked by a private company or some council employee, but I forget the details.
We could just ban the use of Windows in critical IT infrastructure.
I've got a remote control that works on every single TV out there. It's called congress.
Do you want to point to the part of the Constitutition which says 'Congress shall have the right to control TV volume levels'? Because I honestly can't find it.
No. It can’t. It has a sandbox that it plays in. If JS code breaks out of that, it’s a bug. It’s nothing more than ones and zeros arranged in a semi-human-readable fashion that tells an interpreter what to do. You are an interpreter too, but if I told you to go kill yourself, you wouldn’t. Same thing.
Duh, we're not talking about remote exploits running arbitrary machine code on your system. We're talking about Javascript being a privacy-stealing monster _BY DESIGN_.