"Exactly! Google will now have a reocrd of: 1. Your web searches 2. Your email 3. You im conversations If google were the government would you be afraid?"
Just finished watching it, an amazing piece of technical expertise. It certainly shows how impressive the HL2 engine is at speech and lip-syncing.
I thought the depiction of the less cortorted emotional reactions was very nice, but I felt that the "angry" faces just weren't angry enough. (The yelling looked like talking, for example).
Perhaps we won't need "pre-rendered" graphics for truly immersive film sequences any more. I know that a lot of games don't use them, but in thing such as Final Fantasy, the gap between the quality of the pre-rendered and real-time sequences is always quite painfully obvious.
I think the creator(s) could probably find a place at one of the game studios though...
The Galileo system will be open access, but the "higher precision" version which is reserved for US military and allies in the US system will be available to anyone under a subscription.
To quote wikipedia:
An encrypted higher bandwidth Commercial Service with improved accuracy will be available at an extra cost, while the base Open Service will be freely available to anyone with Galileo compatible receiver.
Oh and the Galileo system will be available in the US, too, where any compatibile reciever should get greater accuracy by using both systems.
I looked up the MEPs in my area, found the name of two Lib Dems, and looked up the past and found the one actually *understood* computers (I think he had a degree in computer science, or had worked in software. I can't remember the specifics, it's been a while since I read it.
The response i got from him was pretty anti, he said that they would keep rejecting the bill until the commission did it properly.
Sadly, I think the opinion in the lib dems is a little confused on this, probably a sign of the low level of importance that is placed upon technical issues by political parties.
I know its not a big deal, but to at least *have* a party policy would make it far easier for people to decide about these matters.
DISCLAIMER: I generally vote lib dem, I was contacting them to make sure this particular MEP was worth voting for. I'm not trolling the lib dems, just the lack of coherance in general.
That said, the overwhelming rejection of this directive could show a sign of coherance for once, although I think its more a question of the parliment rejecting games from the commission.
Well I made that prediction because comments in support of enlightenment tend to get modded down as trolling
I'm not trying to troll or overly promote enlightenment, I'm just saying that its an example of what can be done correctly
sadly I *have* been modded down so it appears either I was right in my prediction, or there are many people with modpoints who mod down people who think they'll get modded down;)
I like ELF etc, but I disagree that they should be merged into X. While this seems like a great idea, I think keeping everything modular is best, let the distributor and user choose whether to have every system, but make sure all the systems integrate well and run quickly when they're all used.
I do hope that Rastermann can work with the people developing these technologies so that everything he needs to do his job can be integrated though.:)
My menus in DR17 appear instantly. That's because the developers thought that menu fading was useless;)
You see the key with this is that sometimes these features can be *really useful* and helpful, but they can also be very useless. The important factor is that the technology will be there to use or not use, its up to the developers whether they can find a decent use for it, and up to you whether you want to use it or not.
The most interesting fact is that using a little clever acceleration has made DR17 very, very fast. Thats what I'm trying to emphasise, DR17 is an example of where this technology can be both USEFUL *and* FAST!:)
I already have a lot of these features via Enlightenment DR17. It's not finished yet but in terms of eyecandy and dynamic rendering its very impressive indeed.
I think its great that X is getting a universal architecture for this sort of stuff, but I'll be disapointed if Rastermann and others dont have some sort of input in this, mainly because DR17 is showing me how *fast* this sort of thing can be (faster than KDE in the case of DR17 and a 2 second boot-time on my AMD 2600+).
As for applications made using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.... wow...! Entice is absolutely amazing, totally dynamic and animated, as well as mainly transparent, perfect for an image viewer.
The point is that you don't realise how USEFUL these sort of features are. Why shouldn't menus in an image viewer fade in and out and be semi-transparent? When you use it, it makes perfect sense.
I know there will be people who consider this sort of tech a waste of resources, and it can certainly be abused. However, if it's done properly this type of environment can add a LOT to your user experience.
I suggest you try DR17 to see exactly how impressive this sort of tech can be!
"Tambourine man....(buffering)...(buffering)....play a song...(buffering)...(buffering)...for me. I'm not slee...(buffering)...(buffering)...py and there is no...(buffering)...(buffering)...place I'm going to."
Anyone else reminded of this. Spooky... I can almost hear it!
I am still waiting for a decent GUI, etc for it, because I feel that would be pretty nessesary.
Re:Why is this being posted now?
on
PSP Hackers Go Retro
·
· Score: 2, Informative
the early "hacks" were really just finding clever ways to use the web browser built into wipeout. they weren't actually running any proper code on the PSP itself, and you had to stay near a proper PC or laptop to use them
these hacks are *actualy pieces of code* being run *directly on the firmwire*...
i'll be really impressed when I see linux boot, but i'm waiting for linux on a DS far more
(before anyone says "why the hell.." - the DS is a dual processor, touch screen system - it would make a great cut price PDA)
For all its worth I tapped up a quick generic letter to send to MPs. It more or less represents the views presented by the comments in this thread.
Use it if you will!
START:
To,
I am a citizen within your constituency, and I am writing to inquire about your personal stance upon an issue raised in a recent issue of The Times (June 05, 2005). The article, written by Andrew Porter, discusses plans to extend the length of copyright for popular music within this country to one hundred years.
I am worried at the prospect that record companies could receive royalties for an artists work long after their death. The purpose of copyright was to encourage the development art, but also to develop a pluralistic culture where the work of many people could become a central part of our society.
Imagine a world where someone still owned the rights to Shakespeare, and could charge our Schools and Universities to teach something that is now a part of our culture. This appears to be direction in which our law is heading, after numerous extensions in the length of copyright, where copyrighted art changes from being a temporary protection to a literal piece of property.
This situation would allow a record company to keep making money from a work decades after it's author can no longer benefit from the royalties. This simply doesn't make sense - either copyright is a contract given to an artist to encourage them to create art, or it is property. Since the record industry would like us to believe that copyrighted material is literal property, and therefore copyright infringement is "stealing", then shouldn't this be taxed?
If a one hundred year copyright is not taxed, yet a one hundred year property lease is, then I hope that you will perhaps realise the absurdity of this proposal.
I understand that the record industry has an infinitely greater lobbying power than someone such as myself, but I hope that you will please consider working against a potential change which I am sure will only help a very small minority of people yet cause endless frustration to the majority of this country.
I would be interested to hear any discussion or arguments you may be able to offer. Just knowing your personal view about this topic would be very valuable to me.
This means a simple work around is to install TabBrowserPreferences or any of the other extensions which capture new window commands and make them open in tabs.
I was already using this anyway, but if you're running in a corporate environment or something this could be a quick fix.
Costs of distribution are far lower today than they were maybe 10 years ago, and systems like steam and perhaps bittorrent mean its possible to launch a game on very little revenue - these consoles have broadband adaptors after all. Why the price hike?
Well the fact that three publishers have announced it at the same time makes me wonder if there is something dodgy here.
Any refutements or evidence in this one?
Can't see it turning out well though: Nintendo were previously thrashed on price for the N64, and they were only able to return to somewhere close to their previous revenue by producing an incredibly cheap console.
"28 September: North Korea says it has turned plutonium from 8,000 spent fuel rods into nuclear weapons. Speaking at the UN General Assembly, Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su-hon said the weapons were needed for "self-defence" against "US nuclear threat". "
yeah... this is all a matter of opinion, of course;)
I am not a corporate user, so I tend to take very simple approaches where I don't have to worry about compatibility, etc
however, now Novell are at the helm of SuSE things have changed quite a bit in that respect.
its also all LSB, so things should be fine as far as manually configuring stuff
I don't really know, though, i'm usually happy just to use Yast which i think is a good tool, although for a lot of things (antivir, ntp, apt, etc) i do it by hand
no problems so far, but then this is all relative...:)
of course, if manufacturers designed hardware specifically for linux I would have far less problems... oh well..
SuSE is one of the few distros i've used where everything works without excess playing around.
i wouldn't recommend it for a business environment, though. maybe xandros for that
I think you must be using a very old and pre-novell version, since 9.2 comes with kernel 2.6 installed by default.
i haven't experienced any of those problems, and i am on some *very* weird hardware;)
Since Fedora Core 1 came with a 2.6 kernel (tell me if i'm wrong, it might have been fedora core 2) its a bit unfair to compare a very old distro to a brand new one:p
Fedora for me has been a nightmare, so it *is* different for everyone! Mandrake has always been ok, as has debian and so on...
I still stand by my SuSE recommendation. With creative partitioning you can try a linux distro a day without ever losing your data, I suggest to everyone that they at least *try* these things!:)
I recommend SuSE here, simply because of its driver support. It installs the nvidia drivers at install time if you have a net connection, and provides a good GUI to control all of that.
One click enabling of direct rendering (3d acceleration) is something that I think would be a godsend to most new users.
Also SuSE's exellent documentation cannot be ignored.
On the cedega front I suggest you do try this! It plays Counter Strike via Steam perfectly here, though I can't comment on WOW or anything like that.
I've heard Half Life 2 support is pretty good, and there are a lot of revies on the net that show it's working pretty well. In fact its cedega that's tempting me to go and buy HL2 - an interesting fact since I don't own a windows pc:p
The best thing to do is to just *try* all these things. SuSE isn't free, but there is an FTP install that should cover everything you need for gaming (the commercial extensions wont help you here and the drivers for nvidia are downloaded at install time or during a later online update).
The only problem with SuSE is a lack of a good package manager, but the installation of Apt For SuSE (http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/) solves any problems here.
As for stability I'd recommend SuSE over Mandrake, in usablilty i'd recommend it over just about everything, and I'd recommend it for gamers over the other distros.
I'm happy to answer any questions.:)
(I recommend other distros for other things (eg slackware or debian for servers) but thats not the point. For home users its SuSE all the way)
I commented on this before: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=132377&cid=110 61067
The truth is that BayTSP cannot *easily* aquire new IPs, especially considering there isn't all that much left.
Everytime new IPs are added anywhere they get announced by the IP providers (ARIN, etc) and so its trivial to just search through these logs for any IPs marked "BayTSP".
The reason they don't even TRY to get around these blocks is because not enough people USE the blocking - they don't care if less than 1% of users cannot be caught - they are going after the new users who can be easily scared into stopping/paying.
They specifically attack "examples" - people who can't defend themselves, and thats usually home users who have little experience of computers trying Bittorrent because its quite cool.
Blocklists when 20% of the net is blocked are the ones where reserved ranges such as govt ranges are blocked. The standard AntiP2P list that we filter is only about 44,000 IPs.
Oh and to round it all of, you don't have to block the IPs through HTTP, you can turn that off so websites won't be blocked.
We know its only a temporary solution, but until someone makes something more secure that is used by enough people this is all we have.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Privacy Policy:
"We do not store any of the content of your text or voice communications in our logs."
So no.
I was wondering whether the lack of highly contortive emotions (ie where the face moves quite a lot) are prevented due to limitations in the engine.
:)
We'll see how his improvements change this
Just finished watching it, an amazing piece of technical expertise. It certainly shows how impressive the HL2 engine is at speech and lip-syncing.
I thought the depiction of the less cortorted emotional reactions was very nice, but I felt that the "angry" faces just weren't angry enough. (The yelling looked like talking, for example).
Perhaps we won't need "pre-rendered" graphics for truly immersive film sequences any more. I know that a lot of games don't use them, but in thing such as Final Fantasy, the gap between the quality of the pre-rendered and real-time sequences is always quite painfully obvious.
I think the creator(s) could probably find a place at one of the game studios though...
To quote wikipedia:
An encrypted higher bandwidth Commercial Service with improved accuracy will be available at an extra cost, while the base Open Service will be freely available to anyone with Galileo compatible receiver.
Oh and the Galileo system will be available in the US, too, where any compatibile reciever should get greater accuracy by using both systems.
The world must carry on, if we let our lives be affected by this then the terrorists have won.
Disclaimer: I live a couple of miles from London.
I looked up the MEPs in my area, found the name of two Lib Dems, and looked up the past and found the one actually *understood* computers (I think he had a degree in computer science, or had worked in software. I can't remember the specifics, it's been a while since I read it.
The response i got from him was pretty anti, he said that they would keep rejecting the bill until the commission did it properly.
Sadly, I think the opinion in the lib dems is a little confused on this, probably a sign of the low level of importance that is placed upon technical issues by political parties.
I know its not a big deal, but to at least *have* a party policy would make it far easier for people to decide about these matters.
DISCLAIMER: I generally vote lib dem, I was contacting them to make sure this particular MEP was worth voting for. I'm not trolling the lib dems, just the lack of coherance in general.
That said, the overwhelming rejection of this directive could show a sign of coherance for once, although I think its more a question of the parliment rejecting games from the commission.
Well I made that prediction because comments in support of enlightenment tend to get modded down as trolling
;)
I'm not trying to troll or overly promote enlightenment, I'm just saying that its an example of what can be done correctly
sadly I *have* been modded down so it appears either I was right in my prediction, or there are many people with modpoints who mod down people who think they'll get modded down
*sigh*
I like ELF etc, but I disagree that they should be merged into X. While this seems like a great idea, I think keeping everything modular is best, let the distributor and user choose whether to have every system, but make sure all the systems integrate well and run quickly when they're all used.
:)
I do hope that Rastermann can work with the people developing these technologies so that everything he needs to do his job can be integrated though.
My menus in DR17 appear instantly. That's because the developers thought that menu fading was useless ;)
:)
:)
You see the key with this is that sometimes these features can be *really useful* and helpful, but they can also be very useless. The important factor is that the technology will be there to use or not use, its up to the developers whether they can find a decent use for it, and up to you whether you want to use it or not.
The most interesting fact is that using a little clever acceleration has made DR17 very, very fast. Thats what I'm trying to emphasise, DR17 is an example of where this technology can be both USEFUL *and* FAST!
Seriously, log into the CVS and give it a go!
I think its great that X is getting a universal architecture for this sort of stuff, but I'll be disapointed if Rastermann and others dont have some sort of input in this, mainly because DR17 is showing me how *fast* this sort of thing can be (faster than KDE in the case of DR17 and a 2 second boot-time on my AMD 2600+).
As for applications made using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.... wow...! Entice is absolutely amazing, totally dynamic and animated, as well as mainly transparent, perfect for an image viewer.
The point is that you don't realise how USEFUL these sort of features are. Why shouldn't menus in an image viewer fade in and out and be semi-transparent? When you use it, it makes perfect sense.
I know there will be people who consider this sort of tech a waste of resources, and it can certainly be abused. However, if it's done properly this type of environment can add a LOT to your user experience.
I suggest you try DR17 to see exactly how impressive this sort of tech can be!
Precisely, in fact it is a common feature of monopolies that they fix prices quite highly just because they know there are few alternatives.
I imagine Microsoft will fall victim to this one day (if they haven't already). Just look at telecom companies!
thats good, congratulations on a really great looking project
:)
I'm registerd and I await the Linux version in a few weeks!
Anyone else reminded of this. Spooky... I can almost hear it!
ooh...
now *that* looks promising
I am still waiting for a decent GUI, etc for it, because I feel that would be pretty nessesary.
the early "hacks" were really just finding clever ways to use the web browser built into wipeout. they weren't actually running any proper code on the PSP itself, and you had to stay near a proper PC or laptop to use them
these hacks are *actualy pieces of code* being run *directly on the firmwire*...
i'll be really impressed when I see linux boot, but i'm waiting for linux on a DS far more
(before anyone says "why the hell.." - the DS is a dual processor, touch screen system - it would make a great cut price PDA)
For all its worth I tapped up a quick generic letter to send to MPs. It more or less represents the views presented by the comments in this thread.
,
Use it if you will!
START:
To
I am a citizen within your constituency, and I am writing to inquire about your personal stance upon an issue raised in a recent issue of The Times (June 05, 2005). The article, written by Andrew Porter, discusses plans to extend the length of copyright for popular music within this country to one hundred years.
I am worried at the prospect that record companies could receive royalties for an artists work long after their death. The purpose of copyright was to encourage the development art, but also to develop a pluralistic culture where the work of many people could become a central part of our society.
Imagine a world where someone still owned the rights to Shakespeare, and could charge our Schools and Universities to teach something that is now a part of our culture. This appears to be direction in which our law is heading, after numerous extensions in the length of copyright, where copyrighted art changes from being a temporary protection to a literal piece of property.
This situation would allow a record company to keep making money from a work decades after it's author can no longer benefit from the royalties. This simply doesn't make sense - either copyright is a contract given to an artist to encourage them to create art, or it is property. Since the record industry would like us to believe that copyrighted material is literal property, and therefore copyright infringement is "stealing", then shouldn't this be taxed?
If a one hundred year copyright is not taxed, yet a one hundred year property lease is, then I hope that you will perhaps realise the absurdity of this proposal.
I understand that the record industry has an infinitely greater lobbying power than someone such as myself, but I hope that you will please consider working against a potential change which I am sure will only help a very small minority of people yet cause endless frustration to the majority of this country.
I would be interested to hear any discussion or arguments you may be able to offer. Just knowing your personal view about this topic would be very valuable to me.
Thank you very much for your time.
Yours sincerely,
I tried that, the parent poster is correct.
This means a simple work around is to install TabBrowserPreferences or any of the other extensions which capture new window commands and make them open in tabs.
I was already using this anyway, but if you're running in a corporate environment or something this could be a quick fix.
Price fixing.
Costs of distribution are far lower today than they were maybe 10 years ago, and systems like steam and perhaps bittorrent mean its possible to launch a game on very little revenue - these consoles have broadband adaptors after all. Why the price hike?
Well the fact that three publishers have announced it at the same time makes me wonder if there is something dodgy here.
Any refutements or evidence in this one?
Can't see it turning out well though: Nintendo were previously thrashed on price for the N64, and they were only able to return to somewhere close to their previous revenue by producing an incredibly cheap console.
to remove those annoying ads just add the string *intellitxt* to your adblock rules and refresh the page
:D
thanks adblock
"The funny thing is the US nuclear threat would vaporize their entire country in a single salvo :| Who are they kidding?"
well it's got us talking about it, hasn't it?
the threat of nukes wouldn't be against us, it'd be against its neighbours... but thats not the point either.
the use of ANY nukes is a bad thing. by ANYONE.
in nuclear war there is no good guy or bad guy, the outcome would always be the same.
we (by who i mean those who can't afford bunkers etc) would be screwed.
two rights don't make a wrong, etc.
"The North also **repeated** a claim to have built nuclear weapons for self-defence."
2 52 481.stm
6 04 437.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4
Also:
"28 September: North Korea says it has turned plutonium from 8,000 spent fuel rods into nuclear weapons. Speaking at the UN General Assembly, Vice Foreign Minister Choe Su-hon said the weapons were needed for "self-defence" against "US nuclear threat". "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2
This is just a repetition of a bargaining trick they've used before, do not listen to them.
They want us to be afraid of them as much as our leaders do....
yeah... this is all a matter of opinion, of course ;)
:)
I am not a corporate user, so I tend to take very simple approaches where I don't have to worry about compatibility, etc
however, now Novell are at the helm of SuSE things have changed quite a bit in that respect.
its also all LSB, so things should be fine as far as manually configuring stuff
I don't really know, though, i'm usually happy just to use Yast which i think is a good tool, although for a lot of things (antivir, ntp, apt, etc) i do it by hand
no problems so far, but then this is all relative...
of course, if manufacturers designed hardware specifically for linux I would have far less problems...
oh well..
SuSE is one of the few distros i've used where everything works without excess playing around.
;)
:p
:)
i wouldn't recommend it for a business environment, though. maybe xandros for that
I think you must be using a very old and pre-novell version, since 9.2 comes with kernel 2.6 installed by default.
i haven't experienced any of those problems, and i am on some *very* weird hardware
Since Fedora Core 1 came with a 2.6 kernel (tell me if i'm wrong, it might have been fedora core 2) its a bit unfair to compare a very old distro to a brand new one
Fedora for me has been a nightmare, so it *is* different for everyone! Mandrake has always been ok, as has debian and so on...
I still stand by my SuSE recommendation. With creative partitioning you can try a linux distro a day without ever losing your data, I suggest to everyone that they at least *try* these things!
I recommend SuSE here, simply because of its driver support. It installs the nvidia drivers at install time if you have a net connection, and provides a good GUI to control all of that.
:p
:)
One click enabling of direct rendering (3d acceleration) is something that I think would be a godsend to most new users.
Also SuSE's exellent documentation cannot be ignored.
On the cedega front I suggest you do try this! It plays Counter Strike via Steam perfectly here, though I can't comment on WOW or anything like that.
I've heard Half Life 2 support is pretty good, and there are a lot of revies on the net that show it's working pretty well. In fact its cedega that's tempting me to go and buy HL2 - an interesting fact since I don't own a windows pc
The best thing to do is to just *try* all these things. SuSE isn't free, but there is an FTP install that should cover everything you need for gaming (the commercial extensions wont help you here and the drivers for nvidia are downloaded at install time or during a later online update).
The only problem with SuSE is a lack of a good package manager, but the installation of Apt For SuSE (http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/) solves any problems here.
As for stability I'd recommend SuSE over Mandrake, in usablilty i'd recommend it over just about everything, and I'd recommend it for gamers over the other distros.
I'm happy to answer any questions.
(I recommend other distros for other things (eg slackware or debian for servers) but thats not the point. For home users its SuSE all the way)
do not feed the trolls, I know....
0 61067
I commented on this before: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=132377&cid=11
The truth is that BayTSP cannot *easily* aquire new IPs, especially considering there isn't all that much left.
Everytime new IPs are added anywhere they get announced by the IP providers (ARIN, etc) and so its trivial to just search through these logs for any IPs marked "BayTSP".
The reason they don't even TRY to get around these blocks is because not enough people USE the blocking - they don't care if less than 1% of users cannot be caught - they are going after the new users who can be easily scared into stopping/paying.
They specifically attack "examples" - people who can't defend themselves, and thats usually home users who have little experience of computers trying Bittorrent because its quite cool.
Blocklists when 20% of the net is blocked are the ones where reserved ranges such as govt ranges are blocked. The standard AntiP2P list that we filter is only about 44,000 IPs.
Oh and to round it all of, you don't have to block the IPs through HTTP, you can turn that off so websites won't be blocked.
We know its only a temporary solution, but until someone makes something more secure that is used by enough people this is all we have.