good point... why on earth does the game cost anything when it is subscription based?
Initially, I asked the same question, but after I bought it, it makes more sense.
First off, you get basically 40 days free subscription with the box, so that's a little over $15 of the cost there. There's a reasonably thick manual in there, CDs, packaging, etc. The distributers are also going to cost something. There's no guarantee that you won't get bored after the first month, so they're not going to eat the cost of all of that. Yes, in a month you can get a reasonably strong character and explore a decent amount of area, so people who feel it's eating too much of their life or get fed up with the bugs may not renew after the initial free time.
Granted, they could probably offer a no-manual no-CD version and just charge the cost of bandwidth, especially since they have a large enough user base now that I would assume they've covered their initial costs. My guess would be that they made a deal with their distributor which won't let them do that. That would allow the distributer a better chance of recovering the costs of putting the game in the stores in the first place.
... a 100mW green laser pointer can illuminate a star? I mean okay if there was enough fog I could see him using it as a straight line but who the hell uses optical telescopes in fog?
Ever seen dust illuminated by a projector? Same idea. A thin beam over a long distance will illuminate particles in the air enough that you can get an idea of where someone is pointing in the sky. It works better for green since your eye can detect green better, and appears brighter. Especially if you're in an area that's shielded enough from street lights for star gazing. It's not going to look like those posed pictures where they put a little dry ice out and make a nice solid laser beam, but it's enough for someone to have discussions about stars. Lasers are advertised to be used this way
Despite all that, my point was more that legally, I don't know how you prove that a person was intentionally shining it at an aircraft, since there are legitimate reasons to point a laser skyward.
Well, one of the guys that was questioned was using his green laser to point at stars. Lasers are used quite extensively for astronomy discussions. Also, telescopes and satellites use them for calibration. There are lots of lasers pointed skyward.
Because of this, I don't know how they would ever be able to prosecute someone.. unless they're caught with some complicated tracking system that can follow the human retina at that distance and speed. But if a terrorist had that, why would they use a friggin laser?
"Moran had no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts of his vehicle on a public roadway."
So was this GPS smart enough to turn off when he wasn't on a public roadway? Perhaps while his car was in his driveway? Some neighborhoods' streets are not public. Parking lots aren't public. Granted, an officer tailing him could likely establish the same information, but assuming that the car is always on public property is silly.
I wish I could drag tabs in and out of windows. Occasionally I'll have a set of tabs open, and I come across an unrelated page that I want to keep around, and I wish I could just drag that tab out into a new window. It's kind of a pain to have to open a new window and copy the URL over.
Other people have mentioned that the upgrade to the other computers was accidental. However, it's not just that.. the articles imply that some moron sent out XP patches to 2k machines.
"...unfortunately the request was made to apply it live and it was rolled out across the estate, which hit around 80 per cent of the Win2k desktops..."
Gee.. applying a patch to the wrong OS broke them. Really? Yes, in their code, Microsoft could have probably added some safeguards against stupidity, but this failure wasn't quite due to Microsoft. They do plenty of things that are their fault.. don't bash them when it's not - you just lose credibility.
Can we at least agree (within obvious boundaries) to trust the process?
When I have one friend who was never sent his absentee ballot from Florida, despite their multiple claims of sending it... and when I have another friend who had her proper identification challenged by a Republican poll worker in Madison, WI, retrieved more proper identifications, and was challenged again by the same person, requiring a poll manager to allow her to vote... it's kind of hard to trust the process.
It's absolutely amazing to me that in this day and age that we can't even take a simple count.
In fact, no. I don't have the tape handy, but here's what I recall seeing.
There was a penalty, however, the ref called it on the wrong player because of an optical illusion, hence the confusion. The rule is "All players of offensive team must be stationary at snap, except one back who may be in motion parallel to scrimmage line or backward (not forward)." The player in motion stopped moving parallel, moved forward, and was in the process of getting set when the ball was snapped. The commentators were noting this.
The ref, looking at the player in motion, noticed the guy next to him move before the player that was in motion got set. He called the penalty on the second player, even though he moved with the rest of the team. The actual penalty was that the man in motion was not set, and the player who had the penalty called on him was just moving with everyone else.
Not to mention that even so, the Packers would have had more than enough time to put up a drive equal to the one they scored with to smash the Redskins. So basically, Bush is going to lose fair and square, and whine about someone screwing him.
Shared Geography: "He's from Texas! Not like them panty-waists from Taxachusetts."
Except that he was born in Connecticut. And those Texans that paid attention in their government classes know that the Texas governor has no power. Lastly, those of us that paid attention while he was governor know that he wasn't a very good governor either.
The problem here is that the 'no performance hit' is a bad quotation by the summary author. From the article:
[...] with almost no performance hit. [...] QuickTransit fully supports accelerated 3-D graphics and about 80 percent computational performance on the main processor [...]
Later on, a consultant, after seeing gimp running on windows, says "There was no performance hit", but based on further explanation only means that he did not notice any UI lag from the emulation. That doesn't mean that there wasn't a performance hit, it just means that the UI is approximately as responsive as the normal thing.
A talk I heard by Clinton explained it rather well. NK really doesn't have any normal resources to support their economy, which is why they're excellent weapons makers and arms dealers. This is their resource - to sell weapons, to be arms dealers. The deal used to be that we would give them fuel if they wouldn't work on such programs so they wouldn't need to sell arms to feed their people, but Bush cut it off and guess what.. nuclear research started. Go figure. Therefore, we're worried about it because they have the pressure to sell the weapons for economic reasons. Desperate people do desperate things. Clinton's concern wasn't so much that they would use the weapons as sell them to terrorist groups.
So, I think you went to a different siggraph than I did, because a lot of your facts are bogus. First off, a lot of the sessions I went to had majority Windows users. I sure did see a lot of powerbooks around though. Frankly, most stuff that uses new architectures for real-time rendering only works well on windows. We have some algorithms in our lab for the new nVidia cards that can only be run in a Windows environment.
And most of it is all the same stuff. Dozens of topics -- and every studio pretty much has pretty similar, rather redundant code to do 'em all.
Not exactly. If you listened to a lot of these talks, they said that they based there system on X paper. They all added their own elements to get what they wanted. They are NOT the same algorithms, it is NOT the same code. The LOTR guys said something like "Well, we call it this because that's what it started as, but it's not really that." The systems differ depending on artistic qualities desired, infrastructure, workflow differences, resolution required, speed... This stuff isn't redundant code. These differences are a great competitive advantage.
Why should you get the studio that did the effects for the Matrix or Day After Tomorrow when everyone has the same abilities? It would be really stupid for them to give up this advantage. Yes, great for random Joe that wants to make great looking graphics, but stupid for people that do this for a living and rely on these advantages to feed their families. And don't expect university researchers to write this stuff for you, because their code generally isn't commercially usable.
OpenEXR is *the* format for high-dynamic-range images
The entire point of one of the later talks on HDR was that there isn't an agreed upon, good format for HDR images. So, no, it's isn't *the* format for HDR images. It is *a* format.
Well, it could begin with open source projects becoming valuable to studios, as started happening with Gimp
People in the graphics community still complain that gimp doesn't measure up. I don't know why open source zealots seem to think everyone loves it.
I think a lot of people are missing what's happening here. This wasn't someone breaking into private servers - he just collected some data that was publicly available, used those usernames to make e-mail addresses, and pointed out that he could look up profiles that are also public and get a lot of information about people. There's nothing illegal here. Annoying, yes. Illegal, no.
Some of the people in that thread said that they had mentioned this before and it was ignored, so it's also not a case that those that ran the system didn't know. Sometimes it takes public outcry to convince people to do anything about it.
As far as the vigilante thing goes, I think that comes up because people want to attack this guy that e-mailed them. And, frankly, I think that's wrong. I have a bigger beef with all the paper ads I get in my postal mail - it's a waste of paper and a lot of trash.. but you don't see anyone threatening them.
3,000 americans died on september 11th, and you're telling me that it's not worth giving the government a little more leeway if it could possibly help stop terrorists???
Let's put this number in perspective for a second. According to death stats for 2001, on average 6,620 people died every day in 2001. 1,918 of those from heart disease - every day! How about the European heatwave of 2003? 35,000?11,000+ in France alone? Not to mention we've lost 880 US soldiers in Iraq.
I've seen reports of Iraqi civilian casualties over the 11,000 mark. A people that we haven't even proved had anything to do with the attacks. Who's the terrorist now?
Yes, it's terrible that 3,000 people were murdered on a single day which also took down the WTC towers. The reason it hits you hard was because it was in one place in which you could watch it unfold on TV. Taken in perspective though, I don't think it's worth losing the freedoms and liberties that those who came before us fought and died for. To quote another famous figure in US history, FDR, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
I guess what I don't understand is why, if they're going to approve it, why they don't provide a method for buying it online and downloading it. I would gladly pay to download a real copy for a reasonable price.
I seem to remember liking Telix better for some reason, though maybe it was procomm that I didn't like. I think Telix had windows, an editor, backlog, scripting, logging, other features. Maybe it was just that I could make better scripts for the things I needed it for back then. Anyway, a lot of those programs are still out there.. with notes about things like their awesome SuperVGA graphics:P
I honestly don't think the general public has a clue about how much amateur radio operators do beyond being just a hobby. They're mentioned in news reports all the time, but people don't understand it, so they just ignore it.
For example, recently we got hit by a few tornadoes, so I popped some batteries in an HT my dad gave me, headed for the basement, and flipped on a local repeater to listen to the weather spotters. As the reports of hail and tornado locations came in, my neighbors commented that they always wondered where those reports came from.
Every natural disaster I can think of has had news reports of how essential the hams have been.. everything from Hurricane Andrew to 9/11. Heck, hams even help with communications in things as minor as parades and marathons. And they train annually to ensure that they can operate without any infrastructure. I've seen some interesting setups to get away from relying on gas powered generators.
Personally, these are people that I'd like to keep happy.. because when the shit hits the fan, they're our most reliable communications.
Well, I pay for it through DSL - it comes as part of the package and I never registered for it. I'm not pissed off because basically all this account gets used for is for notices from SBC/Yahoo. My regular e-mail is tied to my domain, with which I can provide different e-mail addresses to different people and keep my primary mailbox from getting spam.
You are currently exceeding your Yahoo! Mail storage quota by a very large amount. You are only allowed -2048.0MB of storage but you are currently using 0.0MB of storage. Your account has been temporarily disabled from receiving new messages.
The easiest way to continue receiving your important email is to expand your mailbox. Yahoo! Mail offers 10, 25, 50 and 100MB of storage space starting at just $9.99/year.
Nice to know that I can only have negative storage. Looks like they want me to give them storage. Not exactly sure how I'm supposed to do that... At least it's just an account that comes with my DSL that I don't use.
I guess this throws a wrench in their claim of 24/7 uptime on their main page. Nice how their marketing team says 100% availability, when people get PhD's by adding more 9's to their 99.99..%'s
The last time I had to read something off of PG, I made a local webpage with an embedded frame, and used a little bit of scripting to allow me to change the colors and fonts and such occassionally. So I'd start with a dark background and light foreground, and when my eyes got tired of that I'd change the contrast. I usually just stuck with the same font, though larger. Surprisingly enough it made it easier for me to get through it. Unfortunately, I have no idea what I did with that page - probably trashed by now.
I've got it installed on my Thinkpad A21p at the moment. The first time I tried to install, the install froze about 2/3's through, subsequent installs were fine. Unfortunately, I can no longer get the madwifi drivers to work for my linksys wireless card, though I was able to get it up and running for FC1. They did fix a couple things, but from the chatter it sounds like they broke a few higher priority ones in the process.
I'm just glad now that I didn't install it on my main machine.. and on a spare harddrive..
Um, if you RTFA, it never says that the murder is 2bn years old. It states the the history of life is 2bn years old.
And if you read his post, you'll realize that he's talking about the headline, which says "New clues to 2bn-year-old murder". Don't be so liberal with your RTFA's.
On a side note, I think this headline highlights a trend I've been seeing in which internet news agencies create misleading or incorrect headlines just to get people to click on them. They're generally remotely related, but tend to say things that aren't supported or even covered by the articles.
Slashdot Mirror
good point ... why on earth does the game cost anything when it is subscription based?
Initially, I asked the same question, but after I bought it, it makes more sense.
First off, you get basically 40 days free subscription with the box, so that's a little over $15 of the cost there. There's a reasonably thick manual in there, CDs, packaging, etc. The distributers are also going to cost something. There's no guarantee that you won't get bored after the first month, so they're not going to eat the cost of all of that. Yes, in a month you can get a reasonably strong character and explore a decent amount of area, so people who feel it's eating too much of their life or get fed up with the bugs may not renew after the initial free time.
Granted, they could probably offer a no-manual no-CD version and just charge the cost of bandwidth, especially since they have a large enough user base now that I would assume they've covered their initial costs. My guess would be that they made a deal with their distributor which won't let them do that. That would allow the distributer a better chance of recovering the costs of putting the game in the stores in the first place.
Ever seen dust illuminated by a projector? Same idea. A thin beam over a long distance will illuminate particles in the air enough that you can get an idea of where someone is pointing in the sky. It works better for green since your eye can detect green better, and appears brighter. Especially if you're in an area that's shielded enough from street lights for star gazing. It's not going to look like those posed pictures where they put a little dry ice out and make a nice solid laser beam, but it's enough for someone to have discussions about stars. Lasers are advertised to be used this way
Despite all that, my point was more that legally, I don't know how you prove that a person was intentionally shining it at an aircraft, since there are legitimate reasons to point a laser skyward.
Well, one of the guys that was questioned was using his green laser to point at stars. Lasers are used quite extensively for astronomy discussions. Also, telescopes and satellites use them for calibration. There are lots of lasers pointed skyward.
Because of this, I don't know how they would ever be able to prosecute someone.. unless they're caught with some complicated tracking system that can follow the human retina at that distance and speed. But if a terrorist had that, why would they use a friggin laser?
"Moran had no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts of his vehicle on a public roadway."
So was this GPS smart enough to turn off when he wasn't on a public roadway? Perhaps while his car was in his driveway? Some neighborhoods' streets are not public. Parking lots aren't public. Granted, an officer tailing him could likely establish the same information, but assuming that the car is always on public property is silly.
I wish I could drag tabs in and out of windows. Occasionally I'll have a set of tabs open, and I come across an unrelated page that I want to keep around, and I wish I could just drag that tab out into a new window. It's kind of a pain to have to open a new window and copy the URL over.
Other people have mentioned that the upgrade to the other computers was accidental. However, it's not just that.. the articles imply that some moron sent out XP patches to 2k machines.
"...unfortunately the request was made to apply it live and it was rolled out across the estate, which hit around 80 per cent of the Win2k desktops..."
Gee.. applying a patch to the wrong OS broke them. Really? Yes, in their code, Microsoft could have probably added some safeguards against stupidity, but this failure wasn't quite due to Microsoft. They do plenty of things that are their fault.. don't bash them when it's not - you just lose credibility.
When I have one friend who was never sent his absentee ballot from Florida, despite their multiple claims of sending it... and when I have another friend who had her proper identification challenged by a Republican poll worker in Madison, WI, retrieved more proper identifications, and was challenged again by the same person, requiring a poll manager to allow her to vote... it's kind of hard to trust the process.
It's absolutely amazing to me that in this day and age that we can't even take a simple count.There was a penalty, however, the ref called it on the wrong player because of an optical illusion, hence the confusion. The rule is "All players of offensive team must be stationary at snap, except one back who may be in motion parallel to scrimmage line or backward (not forward)." The player in motion stopped moving parallel, moved forward, and was in the process of getting set when the ball was snapped. The commentators were noting this.
The ref, looking at the player in motion, noticed the guy next to him move before the player that was in motion got set. He called the penalty on the second player, even though he moved with the rest of the team. The actual penalty was that the man in motion was not set, and the player who had the penalty called on him was just moving with everyone else.
Not to mention that even so, the Packers would have had more than enough time to put up a drive equal to the one they scored with to smash the Redskins. So basically, Bush is going to lose fair and square, and whine about someone screwing him.
Shared Geography: "He's from Texas! Not like them panty-waists from Taxachusetts."
Except that he was born in Connecticut. And those Texans that paid attention in their government classes know that the Texas governor has no power. Lastly, those of us that paid attention while he was governor know that he wasn't a very good governor either.
The problem here is that the 'no performance hit' is a bad quotation by the summary author. From the article:
[...] with almost no performance hit. [...] QuickTransit fully supports accelerated 3-D graphics and about 80 percent computational performance on the main processor [...]
Later on, a consultant, after seeing gimp running on windows, says "There was no performance hit", but based on further explanation only means that he did not notice any UI lag from the emulation. That doesn't mean that there wasn't a performance hit, it just means that the UI is approximately as responsive as the normal thing.
That coming from a U.S. official. We also see:
"The U.S. official said the cloud could be the result of a forest fire."
Last I checked, forest fires don't leave a crater, which was also reported. The U.S. official they're quoting is apparently clueless.
A talk I heard by Clinton explained it rather well. NK really doesn't have any normal resources to support their economy, which is why they're excellent weapons makers and arms dealers. This is their resource - to sell weapons, to be arms dealers. The deal used to be that we would give them fuel if they wouldn't work on such programs so they wouldn't need to sell arms to feed their people, but Bush cut it off and guess what.. nuclear research started. Go figure. Therefore, we're worried about it because they have the pressure to sell the weapons for economic reasons. Desperate people do desperate things. Clinton's concern wasn't so much that they would use the weapons as sell them to terrorist groups.
And most of it is all the same stuff. Dozens of topics -- and every studio pretty much has pretty similar, rather redundant code to do 'em all.
Not exactly. If you listened to a lot of these talks, they said that they based there system on X paper. They all added their own elements to get what they wanted. They are NOT the same algorithms, it is NOT the same code. The LOTR guys said something like "Well, we call it this because that's what it started as, but it's not really that." The systems differ depending on artistic qualities desired, infrastructure, workflow differences, resolution required, speed... This stuff isn't redundant code. These differences are a great competitive advantage.
Why should you get the studio that did the effects for the Matrix or Day After Tomorrow when everyone has the same abilities? It would be really stupid for them to give up this advantage. Yes, great for random Joe that wants to make great looking graphics, but stupid for people that do this for a living and rely on these advantages to feed their families. And don't expect university researchers to write this stuff for you, because their code generally isn't commercially usable.
OpenEXR is *the* format for high-dynamic-range images
The entire point of one of the later talks on HDR was that there isn't an agreed upon, good format for HDR images. So, no, it's isn't *the* format for HDR images. It is *a* format.
Well, it could begin with open source projects becoming valuable to studios, as started happening with Gimp
People in the graphics community still complain that gimp doesn't measure up. I don't know why open source zealots seem to think everyone loves it.
I think a lot of people are missing what's happening here. This wasn't someone breaking into private servers - he just collected some data that was publicly available, used those usernames to make e-mail addresses, and pointed out that he could look up profiles that are also public and get a lot of information about people. There's nothing illegal here. Annoying, yes. Illegal, no.
Some of the people in that thread said that they had mentioned this before and it was ignored, so it's also not a case that those that ran the system didn't know. Sometimes it takes public outcry to convince people to do anything about it.
As far as the vigilante thing goes, I think that comes up because people want to attack this guy that e-mailed them. And, frankly, I think that's wrong. I have a bigger beef with all the paper ads I get in my postal mail - it's a waste of paper and a lot of trash.. but you don't see anyone threatening them.
Let's put this number in perspective for a second. According to death stats for 2001, on average 6,620 people died every day in 2001. 1,918 of those from heart disease - every day! How about the European heatwave of 2003? 35,000? 11,000+ in France alone? Not to mention we've lost 880 US soldiers in Iraq.
I've seen reports of Iraqi civilian casualties over the 11,000 mark. A people that we haven't even proved had anything to do with the attacks. Who's the terrorist now?
Yes, it's terrible that 3,000 people were murdered on a single day which also took down the WTC towers. The reason it hits you hard was because it was in one place in which you could watch it unfold on TV. Taken in perspective though, I don't think it's worth losing the freedoms and liberties that those who came before us fought and died for. To quote another famous figure in US history, FDR, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
I guess what I don't understand is why, if they're going to approve it, why they don't provide a method for buying it online and downloading it. I would gladly pay to download a real copy for a reasonable price.
I seem to remember liking Telix better for some reason, though maybe it was procomm that I didn't like. I think Telix had windows, an editor, backlog, scripting, logging, other features. Maybe it was just that I could make better scripts for the things I needed it for back then. Anyway, a lot of those programs are still out there.. with notes about things like their awesome SuperVGA graphics :P
I honestly don't think the general public has a clue about how much amateur radio operators do beyond being just a hobby. They're mentioned in news reports all the time, but people don't understand it, so they just ignore it.
For example, recently we got hit by a few tornadoes, so I popped some batteries in an HT my dad gave me, headed for the basement, and flipped on a local repeater to listen to the weather spotters. As the reports of hail and tornado locations came in, my neighbors commented that they always wondered where those reports came from.
Every natural disaster I can think of has had news reports of how essential the hams have been.. everything from Hurricane Andrew to 9/11. Heck, hams even help with communications in things as minor as parades and marathons. And they train annually to ensure that they can operate without any infrastructure. I've seen some interesting setups to get away from relying on gas powered generators.
Personally, these are people that I'd like to keep happy.. because when the shit hits the fan, they're our most reliable communications.
Well, I pay for it through DSL - it comes as part of the package and I never registered for it. I'm not pissed off because basically all this account gets used for is for notices from SBC/Yahoo. My regular e-mail is tied to my domain, with which I can provide different e-mail addresses to different people and keep my primary mailbox from getting spam.
Here's a snippet from my e-mail:
You are currently exceeding your Yahoo! Mail storage quota by a very large amount. You are only allowed -2048.0MB of storage but you are currently using 0.0MB of storage. Your account has been temporarily disabled from receiving new messages.
The easiest way to continue receiving your important email is to expand your mailbox. Yahoo! Mail offers 10, 25, 50 and 100MB of storage space starting at just $9.99/year.
Nice to know that I can only have negative storage. Looks like they want me to give them storage. Not exactly sure how I'm supposed to do that... At least it's just an account that comes with my DSL that I don't use.
I guess this throws a wrench in their claim of 24/7 uptime on their main page. Nice how their marketing team says 100% availability, when people get PhD's by adding more 9's to their 99.99..%'s
The last time I had to read something off of PG, I made a local webpage with an embedded frame, and used a little bit of scripting to allow me to change the colors and fonts and such occassionally. So I'd start with a dark background and light foreground, and when my eyes got tired of that I'd change the contrast. I usually just stuck with the same font, though larger. Surprisingly enough it made it easier for me to get through it. Unfortunately, I have no idea what I did with that page - probably trashed by now.
I've got it installed on my Thinkpad A21p at the moment. The first time I tried to install, the install froze about 2/3's through, subsequent installs were fine. Unfortunately, I can no longer get the madwifi drivers to work for my linksys wireless card, though I was able to get it up and running for FC1. They did fix a couple things, but from the chatter it sounds like they broke a few higher priority ones in the process.
I'm just glad now that I didn't install it on my main machine.. and on a spare harddrive..
Um, if you RTFA, it never says that the murder is 2bn years old. It states the the history of life is 2bn years old. And if you read his post, you'll realize that he's talking about the headline, which says "New clues to 2bn-year-old murder". Don't be so liberal with your RTFA's. On a side note, I think this headline highlights a trend I've been seeing in which internet news agencies create misleading or incorrect headlines just to get people to click on them. They're generally remotely related, but tend to say things that aren't supported or even covered by the articles.
Yeah, it's the stuff moving on the screen, not the wheel itself. I can hear it when I change firefox tabs as well :P