I noticed the submitter was a wee sarcastic (and humorously so) about the movie experience that includes 10-15 minutes of commercials, another 10-20 minutes of trailers, and a 100 minute movie.
Sure, the commercials and the trailers MIGHT be annoying, but the last time I checked, there wasn't a cattle prod installed in each theater seat that zapped you if your head deviated to the left/right or your eyes closed during the commercials/previews. NO ONE IS MAKING YOU WATCH THEM!
Advertisers will be advertisers -- they have a captive audience -- a room full of people who often invest nearly $50 - $75 to take a family to the movies w/ popcorn and drinks. Unless a family can throw that money away and leave out of disgust, or wait out the commercials and still expect to find decent seats after the lights go down, then the advertisers have the perfect group of people to throw ads at for 10-15 minutes before they release the desired entertainment from the depths of the projection room.
As for previews -- what's the problem with those? Unless they're for teen movies or Julia Roberts mushy flicks. If you don't like the previews, then do what you could've been doing during the first 10-15 minutes of commercials -- make out with your date, chit chat like everyone else is doing during the boring commercials/previews, etc. Again -- the advertisers haven't wired the theater seats to shock you into submission. Yet.
The complaint about the pre-movie crap that only takes 20-30 minutes of your time (if you have to be the first to sit down in a theater) reminds me of a news story that came out about a year ago. Sadly, none of the news websites still carry it, but basically, a guy sued theater operators for taking up his time with commercials and useless previews. He wanted to sue them for damages of lost time incurred while having to get to the thaeter early, sit and watch the pre-show, then the commercials, and then the previews -- all before the movie. He argued that his time was valuable and worth monetary compensation because he lost that time to stuff that he didn't pay for.
All I could think was, "Is the dude going to the movies during his lunch hour?" When the f--- did ANYONE's entertainment time become valuable enough that a business had to recompense them for consuming more than their fair share of said time? It's a CHOICE to go see a movie, and unless you're losing wages because you were gone from work for 30 minutes longer than your lunch hour when you saw a 1 hour movie (hypothetically speaking, of course), your TIME is yours to spend, waste, fart away, etc.
People who CHOOSE not to deal with losing that time are downloading movies on the Internet -- the whole point of the post. And people can also CHOOSE not to give their money to theater operators, show up late and get shitty seats, etc.
I'd be concerned that theater operators would come up with some nutjob scheme to weed out those who wait until the last minute to skip the commercials/previews. If you pay $8, for example, you can go on in and sit through all that crap. If you want to loiter or not go into the theater, or if you show up 2 minutes before the show starts, you pay $15 to compensate for the lost "viewership" of the ads/previews before the movie. It COULD be worse, people.
Seriously -- let's assume that this "toy" will win customers that will be at least "this short" to play -- 14 years and younger. 15 years and older have boobies and ding dongs to occupy them, along with weed, crack, and whatever else gets past government school teachers.
So -- we've narrowed the user base down to kids who may or may not lose interest in the PSP after about 2-3 weeks. Kids who might not necessarily know what a pixel is, let alone if it's dead. Kids who will toss it aside if it breaks, piss of their parents by wasting a Christmas gift, and go back to playing the full-size XBox or PS2 they already own.
Parents will give a crap, only because they'll be compelled to go back to Best Buyfriggin' go BACK 2-3 days AFTER Christmas, stand in line behind the smelly holiday drunk who's going to punch a customer service lackey in the face, and wait 1 hour for the mess to be cleaned up before they're informed of customer damage vs. manufacturer defect policies and 15% restocking fees by said customer service lackey's un-punched replacement.
My 2 cents. And neither of them would ever be spent on buying one of these for my kid. Build 'em a PC and teach 'em how to infect your home network with a Paris Hilton video worm or a backdoor hard-drive erasing trojan with a pop-up Pokemon mooning the screen, I say! That's certainly guaranteed to spur more conversation between a parent and child than a PSP beeping and blooping away in the backseat of the family minivan.
IronChefMorimoto
Biggest plus about VHS -- DRM couldn't touch it
on
The VHS is Dead
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I can honestly say that I won't miss VHS. I stopped recording stuff to my VCR almost 2 years ago when TiVOs, recordable DVDs, etc. starting coming out. I've just been too poor to plunk down and pay the lifetime fee for a TiVO or build my own PVR.
However, when I started to craft this reply -- something struck me -- VHS doesn't have DRM that prevents it from recording stuff. Or being passed around with friends. Etc., etc., etc.
Yes, you can't use a VCR to decode a DirecTV signal without a DirecTV receiver, and that might be poor man's DRM. I don't know -- were there ever VCR + sat. receivers?
And popping the write protection tab on a tape isn't so much DRM as "honey, don't you even think about taping that football game over our wedding video."
VHS was mainstream, you could record most anything that you could get a signal into the VCR, and you could pass it around at leisure. There was talk about digital VCRs coming out in the future that would tag copyrighted broadcasts, I think, and would basically introduce VHS DRM, but for the most part, it's been DRM free, right?
Now, we have TiVOs that are getting more and more restrictive or control happy (for the average consumer -- maybe not/. TiVO mavens), DVDs that can't be copied to preserve a copy, and homebuilt PVRs that may become illegal to use to skip commercials or obsolete if content providers start ramping up DRM efforts on the signal level.
I hated using VHS tapes, but they were pretty no-nonsense. Ahhh...the good ol' days. Now I must go back to finding some money to build a PVR, buy a TiVO, pay off my wife when I get an HDTV for the living room, etc.
That would be great -- to have Richard Dean Anderson (RDA) in a lesser SG-1 role. Perfect. It's not as though he doesn't already look bored off his ass as it is. Jeez -- I mean the highlight of this past half of 8th season was the guest appearance of a Conan O'Brian stage hand/production assistant with RDA in the gate control room:
And now he might have a lesser role? Uh -- no. That would be Starge SG-0.75 or SG-3/4. Wait! Maybe they'll bring back Parker Fucking Lewis. He can't lose, right?
As a fan of this series, I must admit that I'm concerned about where the 9th season will go. I thought they were pushing it to do an 8th season and still get in an SG-1-casted movie. Now, I'm even more dismayed that the series might end as badly as The X-Files did.
One more thing -- Amanda Tapping should've kept her legs closed until the series was done and the movie was in production. 'cause if she bails on SG-1 to be a mommy, she's going to really regret looking at preggie on friggin' Proof Positive when she has no other work (sans minor chick flick appearances).
I think you could argue against the idea that we're just getting ads anyway, seeing as FireFox and the Google toolbar, once people know about them, can significantly cut down on the pop-up ads people get. Plus, there are a lot of anti-pop-up products out there from Symantec and various ISPs that people are getting standard with new computers or Internet service these days.
The overall message has been, I think, that Internet Explorer isn't the source of the pop-up ads -- it's just the vehicle for the pop-up ads on your computer. Along with viruses or spyware that might contribute to the problem.
Thus, the browser (and I think this is one reason FireFox hasn't pushed more into IE's market share) is not really perceived as the pop-up ad "problem." Now, you have the "free" Opera browser, but "free" meaning an advertisement driven browser. Pair that with the fact that mainstream/casual web surfers would find "paying" for a non-advertisement driven browser, and I think that the argument that the ads are going to be there anyway falls flat.
It's a tough sell -- I don't get ads if I download these free tools for IE or this free web browser.
Don't get me wrong -- I've tried Opera in the past. It just didn't appeal to me after I tried the new Mozilla and FireFox offerings. I'm glad it's still around -- it makes two big players to cut into Microsoft's IE usage.
This research could cost a lot less if they just did some searches on dudes in comas after car wrecks who wake up and save nurses' children from burning houses, only to learn their ex married someone else and feigned the bastard child off as the new guy's:
This is true -- although -- how does it work if you run for president as an active senator and lose? Does your state have to hold off on filling that seat to see if you lose? And what if, after you lose, your constituents decide that they're not interested in having you back?
Sorry -- I've just never thought about it in that way. Lieberman, I guess, did the same thing in 2000, right?
...want to welcome our new Republican legislative and executive overlords. I look forward to mandatory Sunday School for at least the next 2 years. My parents (Baptists) will be proud.
Seriously, though -- I was torn between Bush and Kerry this election, and I yearned for a viable third-party candidate with which to speak using my vote.
I'll be honest -- I voted for Bush, but I was ready to select some Democratic and Libertarian representatives in state government and Congress. To each his own, I say.
And I'm also ready to say "Thank you" to Kerry for being a semi-decent sport and not going nuts like Gore did in 2000. It's the first time I've felt some genuine respect for the man -- the fact that he conceded before lawyering up scores high marks in my mind. Perhaps a sign that, despite his political ambitions, he was willing to accept a less than desirable outcome early on and avoid having America trounced in legal hubbub for the next several weeks.
Someone mentioned that this might be a way of hunting down errant, illegal copies of non-product activation corporate editions of MS Windows products. I would take that a step further and venture to say that this will be the next step in "product" activation. Instead of requiring the hassle of the product activation phone call/activation code entry for corporate clients, they will, instead, find ways to monitor corporate clients for errant product IDs floating around outside the bounds of a corporate purchasers' license terms.
I would suspect that Microsoft could easily come up with some way to monitor an individual corporate license being used during product updates. Maybe they keep a head count of how many licensed copies are out there under a particular company's account. When 2041 licenses are detected for a corporate account of only 1000 licenses, Microsoft will skip going after the pirates and basically take the issue to the company in terms of fines and/or a nice big Microsoft bill.
Could they do it with IPs? Make each company register a domain and/or IP range for corporate clients? Probably not, given that corporate clients could be working mobilely and the prospect of spoofing. But perhaps they could account for that and start issuing a set # of desktop licenses (that don't move) and a set # of laptop/mobile licenses that can move off the network. A little harder to say "you gave out more product IDs/licenses than allowed," but still a means of tracking licenses outside a set number of mobile clients. There would most likely be a threshold of, say, 20% more than the license limit before the company got called on it.
I could see this as Microsoft's wakeup call to its corporate customers. Control your licenses, or you will be charged/fined accordingly. It might hurt business for Microsoft and cause some changeover to other systems, but for the most part, businesses are going to have to do business with software that meets their needs. And as long as Microsoft is the dominant player in the corporate world for desktop computing, businesses will have to make the effort to meet their licensing demands.
If I were you guys, I wouldn't be calling their supercomputer a "Hokie supercomputer." Some of them thar Virginians might get a wee rankled thinkin' you said "Hokey supercomputer," and 12+ teraflops ain't too hokey. Who says? The end of my buckshot Blue Ridge rifle, that's who!
IronChefMorimoto
P.S. - Take my word on this as an ex-North Carolinian-- I called an Appalachian State University server farm rather "dairy" and nearly got my ass shot off.;-)
I'm not a rocket scientist, or I'd have something more informative to say.
I did skim over the Wikipedia article, though, and I was curious -- the impression given is that these sorts of rocket engines can't escape Earth gravity and would have to be put together in orbit (again -- going strictly by Wikipedia article on subject).
I have 2 questions. First, if you build it in space, and you make it to Mars, would you have enough thrust in the lower gravity of Mars to lift off again with a full payload, say, of people and Mars rocks? Would a Mars lander be required with conventional rockets to get back to a control vehicle?
My second question is -- how the hell would they put this together at a reasonable cost in space? The Russians blew the hell out of their Mir space station at least a few times. And I seem to remember that the new ISS crew nearly rammed the hell out of the space station when they hooked up with the station last week. Feel free to pile on with other minor news stories about lost tools, broken this and that, etc. with the ISS.
And you want politicians with money from taxpayers to approve funding for NASA to build something "nuclear" in orbit with this kind of scary news history? I have full faith that NASA or an international consortium could make it work, but what about Joe Public, the environmentally-motivated voter, who fears a mushroom cloud screwing up astronomy night for his kids?
Finally, and this is most important -- with this nuclear rocket engine, would the guy from Sliders and Gary Sinise be able to save Tim Robbins before he burned up in the Mars atmosphere?
I wanted to chime in here. My friend and I put together HIS Zalman Reserator (not mine -- got no extra money for these things) and Antec Aria SFF PC a few weeks ago with tremendous results. The Zalman Reserator retails for $250 at Frys. Most online vendors charge more for it.
It's basically a 2.5' tall heatsink/radiator with a submerged pump. It includes a waterblock for your processor (Intel and AMD) and all the tubing/hardware you need.
You lose the ability to easily bleed the thing, although clamping off hoses and pouring nearly 3 liters of water out the top of a Reserator doesn't really seem all that troublesome to me.
Bottom line -- he dropped his idle temps by 20C and his load temps by a similar amount. This was a few weeks ago when it was slightly warmer here in Georgia. He now idles (running a P4 Prescott) at about 27C. It's pretty amazing.
For Christ's sake -- it's friggin' water. You drink water because you're thirsty. You don't drink water because you want it to taste this way or that. If you do, then you're drinking tea. Or soda. Or beer. Or dirty water.
And that's really the issue here -- is it DIRTY? HORRORS! Could it have been pissed, pooped, or fish fucked in? Christ -- every drop of water on this planet, I would think given my crappy government school science class-based environmental education, has been pissed, pooped, or fish fucked in at some point.
Taste is only a factor if the damned H2O doesn't taste like, well, H20 -- that taste is called WATER. There is no variant to it, unless it's dirty.
I don't see what the damned big deal is. They're recycling. Enjoy their efforts.
Um, I officially want to call bullshit on this on behalf of all men on the planet stuck in offices that are blisteringly hot...because of women who DO NOT LIKE TO BE COLD.
This study should've gone further and broken down the data on gender, because I have yet to find a guy in the various offices that I've worked in that thought the temps in the office were TOO COLD to WORK PRODUCTIVELY.
On the contrary, I've had nearly drop-down-dragged-out fights with the ladies in offices where I've worked because of the thermostat. No -- I'm not a violent man -- I'm not putting smackdown on cold female co-workers. I'm talking about insidious "cold war" (no pun intended) tactics -- surreptitiously bumping UP/DOWN the thermostat on the way to the can; taking informal "polls" asking how COLD people think the office is; etc.
The only way I've found to combat the never ending "cold ware" in my office is to basically lay down the equivalent of mutually assured grossing out. I basically tell the ladies in the office whining about the cold that I can either take of my shirt to stay cool and let them turn up the heat, or they can put on more clothing.
Man boobs are a powerful weapon in the hands of the right male.
IronChefMorimoto
Ugh -- eyes are playing tricks on me.
on
Replacing TCP?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
While this sounds very interesting (have to re-take all those networking certification exams again, I guess), when I read this...
The guy who started it, Petar Maymounkov, is of Kademlia fame."...my eyes told my brain this...
The guy who started it, Petar Maymounkov, is of Chlamydia fame."
I was about to wonder what sort of "fame" you could get from that. Need coffee. Need sleep.
I only had time to read Anandtech's preview this morning for the nForce4 chipsets, and I wasn't sure that the Ultra and SLI chipsets would be made available for Socket 754 A64 CPUs.
I checked Nvidia's website for information on this, and I found tech specs for each chipset:
As you can see -- no specifics on the socket support. I'm wondering if this will be at the discretion of the motherboard manufacturers. My hope is that Nvidia will encourage both Socket 754 and Socket 939 variants of the motherboards with these chipsets.
I'm an owner of a Socket 754 CPU, and I know that a lot of friends invested money as early adopters of the A64 CPU in these Socket 754 platforms. I unloaded nearly $375 for my Socket 754 A64 before AMD started cutting prices and introducing the early, and very expensive, Socket 939 CPUs.
That's an investment that I can't just shirk off in order to take advantage of a much less expensive chipset/motherboard upgrade for, say, $125 for a top tier nForce4 motherboard (just guessing at the pricing here -- don't take it literally).
Heh -- the coverage on Google starting a brower here, developing an IM client there, evaluating the Internet 3 here (gotchya!), etc. is getting a little nuts. I'm starting to see Google-this and Google-that everywhere. Kind of like Starbucks.
Google AdSense ads on every website I visit now. Google in my browser toolbar (my fault). Google gmail account suffixes in my e-mail client. Google showing up every 3rd or 4th story on Slashdot. My boss asking ME about researching Google paid advertising for our web clients.
Honestly, though -- it's neat to have a company with this sort of mystique around again. Those Segway people ruined their suspense when Joan Lunden nearly broke her neck during the TV morning show demonstration of the product. The lovely folks manufacturing those Crusoe processors have done delightlfully boring stuff with their systems (how come I ain't seeing non-obscure Japanese variants of laptops NOT running Intel processors at Best Buy?). And now that Carmack has released Doom3...it's on to another game.
Way to go Google -- just give us a heads up when you start opening a retail Google Country search engine store next to the Wal-Mart Supercenter in my NC hometown. The Starbucks there sort of spooked the natives. But they like it now -- they've assimilated nicely the frappacinos and espressos into their routine. Plus, the Starbucks cups hold more tobacco spit than the ones from McDonald's.
I seem to remember reading an AutoWeek article about 2 years ago about the time that DaimlerChrysler's Jeep divison introduced the Jeep Liberty small SUV.
I opened my mail, and I saw this full page cover photo on this weekly auto magazine showing a Jeep Liberty tipping over during a slalom test. An inset picture showed the friggin' car flipped over on its side, if I remember correctly. I'm posting from work, so read for yourself:
Turns out, AutoWeek testers were doing their standard lane change avoidance/slalom test that they do with everything from Hyundais to GMC Yukons. I'm pretty sure it was a production Jeep Liberty -- nothing pre-production -- that flipped over twice (???) and landed on its side during this relatively commonplace automotive review test.
The driver, thankfully, only suffered a sore neck (nearly broke it, if it had rolled one more time), and AutoWeek devoted their entire issue to this vehicle which had been designed to put an affordable small SUV Jeep into the hands of consumers.
DaimlerChrysler balked and basically claimed that THE TEST WAS NOT A REAL WORLD TEST. AutoWeek called bullshit and basically said, "Uh, yeah it is -- if a driver has to make a quick lane change and or dodge something in the road, it's as real world as it gets."
I seem to remember that DaimlerChrysler continued to balk at the test, but in fact they ended up making center of gravity changes to the vehicle (suspension and ride height, perhaps?) over the course of the next model year.
Sounds like the same crap that Renault is doing here.
It's funny -- the automotive press gets touted all the time when they LOVE a car and try and hype up the manufacturers' products, but heaven forbid that they also try and save the manufacturer a little legal trouble by finding out these sorts of dangerous rollover issues and what not in pre-production cars. Only the GOOD NEWS, right? Bullshit.
Sadly, I had no idea that I was competing against you for Karma. Thanks to the FAQ, I'm still pretty much confused. Continue to whore if it makes you happy, but if I'm an indirect Kharma pimp, I expect my cut, bitch.;-)
A friend of mine and I were talking the other night about local Atlanta, GA computer stores, and he mentioned that Monarch Computer is one of the only vendors from whom you can purchase the 4-way Opteron 800 series processors ($1200 a piece -- damn!).
He's been in grad school out of state for a few years and was suprised to learn that Monarch Computer is, in fact, in his hometown backyard. Kind of kewl to walk in a store in your own town and walk out with a $1200 4-way processor.
Until the wife finds out and sends you back to said store with the receipt in hand for a refund.:-\
IronChefMorimoto
P.S. - I don't work for these guys or advocate their store. I just thought it was cool to have such a vendor nearby. Too bad they don't sell Shuttle XPCs.
DOH! Sorry about that. It scrolled offscreen before I saw it, and I had just read the Anandtech.com article before posting my comment in the Doom3 area. My bad, but hey -- at least people who missed it onscreen yesterday and look at it again.;-)
It's more of an AGP GPU on Linux comparison, but the information on some of the setup was, for a Linux newbie like me, a little informative. I had considered doing a Linux installation on my A64 gaming machine (using a separate hard drive) and installing some of the Linux versions of games that are mentioned in the article.
I'm curious, though -- do most of the mainstream game Linux versions come on the CD-ROM or have to be downloaded from the developer? Doom3, for example, requires the Windows CD for adding some files to the Linux installation. Enemy Territory is standalone. What about Jedi Knights: Jedi Academy, as mentioned in the Anandtech article? On the CD-ROM? Or a free download without requiring anything from the original Windows CD-ROM?
Anyway -- a good article. I enjoyed seeing information about gaming on Linux. Now, I just gotta get an Nvidia card so I don't have to struggle as a Linux newbie with the ATI driver installation.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed the submitter was a wee sarcastic (and humorously so) about the movie experience that includes 10-15 minutes of commercials, another 10-20 minutes of trailers, and a 100 minute movie.
Sure, the commercials and the trailers MIGHT be annoying, but the last time I checked, there wasn't a cattle prod installed in each theater seat that zapped you if your head deviated to the left/right or your eyes closed during the commercials/previews. NO ONE IS MAKING YOU WATCH THEM!
Advertisers will be advertisers -- they have a captive audience -- a room full of people who often invest nearly $50 - $75 to take a family to the movies w/ popcorn and drinks. Unless a family can throw that money away and leave out of disgust, or wait out the commercials and still expect to find decent seats after the lights go down, then the advertisers have the perfect group of people to throw ads at for 10-15 minutes before they release the desired entertainment from the depths of the projection room.
As for previews -- what's the problem with those? Unless they're for teen movies or Julia Roberts mushy flicks. If you don't like the previews, then do what you could've been doing during the first 10-15 minutes of commercials -- make out with your date, chit chat like everyone else is doing during the boring commercials/previews, etc. Again -- the advertisers haven't wired the theater seats to shock you into submission. Yet.
The complaint about the pre-movie crap that only takes 20-30 minutes of your time (if you have to be the first to sit down in a theater) reminds me of a news story that came out about a year ago. Sadly, none of the news websites still carry it, but basically, a guy sued theater operators for taking up his time with commercials and useless previews. He wanted to sue them for damages of lost time incurred while having to get to the thaeter early, sit and watch the pre-show, then the commercials, and then the previews -- all before the movie. He argued that his time was valuable and worth monetary compensation because he lost that time to stuff that he didn't pay for.
All I could think was, "Is the dude going to the movies during his lunch hour?" When the f--- did ANYONE's entertainment time become valuable enough that a business had to recompense them for consuming more than their fair share of said time? It's a CHOICE to go see a movie, and unless you're losing wages because you were gone from work for 30 minutes longer than your lunch hour when you saw a 1 hour movie (hypothetically speaking, of course), your TIME is yours to spend, waste, fart away, etc.
People who CHOOSE not to deal with losing that time are downloading movies on the Internet -- the whole point of the post. And people can also CHOOSE not to give their money to theater operators, show up late and get shitty seats, etc.
I'd be concerned that theater operators would come up with some nutjob scheme to weed out those who wait until the last minute to skip the commercials/previews. If you pay $8, for example, you can go on in and sit through all that crap. If you want to loiter or not go into the theater, or if you show up 2 minutes before the show starts, you pay $15 to compensate for the lost "viewership" of the ads/previews before the movie. It COULD be worse, people.
Now, go enjoy a movie.
IronChefMorimoto
Seriously -- let's assume that this "toy" will win customers that will be at least "this short" to play -- 14 years and younger. 15 years and older have boobies and ding dongs to occupy them, along with weed, crack, and whatever else gets past government school teachers.
So -- we've narrowed the user base down to kids who may or may not lose interest in the PSP after about 2-3 weeks. Kids who might not necessarily know what a pixel is, let alone if it's dead. Kids who will toss it aside if it breaks, piss of their parents by wasting a Christmas gift, and go back to playing the full-size XBox or PS2 they already own.
Parents will give a crap, only because they'll be compelled to go back to Best Buyfriggin' go BACK 2-3 days AFTER Christmas, stand in line behind the smelly holiday drunk who's going to punch a customer service lackey in the face, and wait 1 hour for the mess to be cleaned up before they're informed of customer damage vs. manufacturer defect policies and 15% restocking fees by said customer service lackey's un-punched replacement.
My 2 cents. And neither of them would ever be spent on buying one of these for my kid. Build 'em a PC and teach 'em how to infect your home network with a Paris Hilton video worm or a backdoor hard-drive erasing trojan with a pop-up Pokemon mooning the screen, I say! That's certainly guaranteed to spur more conversation between a parent and child than a PSP beeping and blooping away in the backseat of the family minivan.
IronChefMorimoto
I can honestly say that I won't miss VHS. I stopped recording stuff to my VCR almost 2 years ago when TiVOs, recordable DVDs, etc. starting coming out. I've just been too poor to plunk down and pay the lifetime fee for a TiVO or build my own PVR.
/. TiVO mavens), DVDs that can't be copied to preserve a copy, and homebuilt PVRs that may become illegal to use to skip commercials or obsolete if content providers start ramping up DRM efforts on the signal level.
However, when I started to craft this reply -- something struck me -- VHS doesn't have DRM that prevents it from recording stuff. Or being passed around with friends. Etc., etc., etc.
Yes, you can't use a VCR to decode a DirecTV signal without a DirecTV receiver, and that might be poor man's DRM. I don't know -- were there ever VCR + sat. receivers?
And popping the write protection tab on a tape isn't so much DRM as "honey, don't you even think about taping that football game over our wedding video."
VHS was mainstream, you could record most anything that you could get a signal into the VCR, and you could pass it around at leisure. There was talk about digital VCRs coming out in the future that would tag copyrighted broadcasts, I think, and would basically introduce VHS DRM, but for the most part, it's been DRM free, right?
Now, we have TiVOs that are getting more and more restrictive or control happy (for the average consumer -- maybe not
I hated using VHS tapes, but they were pretty no-nonsense. Ahhh...the good ol' days. Now I must go back to finding some money to build a PVR, buy a TiVO, pay off my wife when I get an HDTV for the living room, etc.
IronChefMorimoto
The bastards. Could they have told us this AFTER I finished winning Doom3, HALO, and HL2? Crap. And I don't have vision insurance right now.
Fuck it -- my wife says I'm good at groping around for things in the dark. I'll survive.
IronChefMorimoto
That would be great -- to have Richard Dean Anderson (RDA) in a lesser SG-1 role. Perfect. It's not as though he doesn't already look bored off his ass as it is. Jeez -- I mean the highlight of this past half of 8th season was the guest appearance of a Conan O'Brian stage hand/production assistant with RDA in the gate control room:
4 524?hilite=conan
http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,1028
And now he might have a lesser role? Uh -- no. That would be Starge SG-0.75 or SG-3/4. Wait! Maybe they'll bring back Parker Fucking Lewis. He can't lose, right?
As a fan of this series, I must admit that I'm concerned about where the 9th season will go. I thought they were pushing it to do an 8th season and still get in an SG-1-casted movie. Now, I'm even more dismayed that the series might end as badly as The X-Files did.
One more thing -- Amanda Tapping should've kept her legs closed until the series was done and the movie was in production. 'cause if she bails on SG-1 to be a mommy, she's going to really regret looking at preggie on friggin' Proof Positive when she has no other work (sans minor chick flick appearances).
IronChefMorimoto
I think you could argue against the idea that we're just getting ads anyway, seeing as FireFox and the Google toolbar, once people know about them, can significantly cut down on the pop-up ads people get. Plus, there are a lot of anti-pop-up products out there from Symantec and various ISPs that people are getting standard with new computers or Internet service these days.
The overall message has been, I think, that Internet Explorer isn't the source of the pop-up ads -- it's just the vehicle for the pop-up ads on your computer. Along with viruses or spyware that might contribute to the problem.
Thus, the browser (and I think this is one reason FireFox hasn't pushed more into IE's market share) is not really perceived as the pop-up ad "problem." Now, you have the "free" Opera browser, but "free" meaning an advertisement driven browser. Pair that with the fact that mainstream/casual web surfers would find "paying" for a non-advertisement driven browser, and I think that the argument that the ads are going to be there anyway falls flat.
It's a tough sell -- I don't get ads if I download these free tools for IE or this free web browser.
Don't get me wrong -- I've tried Opera in the past. It just didn't appeal to me after I tried the new Mozilla and FireFox offerings. I'm glad it's still around -- it makes two big players to cut into Microsoft's IE usage.
IronChefMorimoto
This research could cost a lot less if they just did some searches on dudes in comas after car wrecks who wake up and save nurses' children from burning houses, only to learn their ex married someone else and feigned the bastard child off as the new guy's:
http://www.usanetwork.com/series/thedeadzone/
Johnny Smith could really help save some money here.
IronChefMorimoto
This is true -- although -- how does it work if you run for president as an active senator and lose? Does your state have to hold off on filling that seat to see if you lose? And what if, after you lose, your constituents decide that they're not interested in having you back?
Sorry -- I've just never thought about it in that way. Lieberman, I guess, did the same thing in 2000, right?
IronChefMorimoto
...want to welcome our new Republican legislative and executive overlords. I look forward to mandatory Sunday School for at least the next 2 years. My parents (Baptists) will be proud.
Seriously, though -- I was torn between Bush and Kerry this election, and I yearned for a viable third-party candidate with which to speak using my vote.
I'll be honest -- I voted for Bush, but I was ready to select some Democratic and Libertarian representatives in state government and Congress. To each his own, I say.
And I'm also ready to say "Thank you" to Kerry for being a semi-decent sport and not going nuts like Gore did in 2000. It's the first time I've felt some genuine respect for the man -- the fact that he conceded before lawyering up scores high marks in my mind. Perhaps a sign that, despite his political ambitions, he was willing to accept a less than desirable outcome early on and avoid having America trounced in legal hubbub for the next several weeks.
My 2 cents.
IronChefMorimoto
Someone mentioned that this might be a way of hunting down errant, illegal copies of non-product activation corporate editions of MS Windows products. I would take that a step further and venture to say that this will be the next step in "product" activation. Instead of requiring the hassle of the product activation phone call/activation code entry for corporate clients, they will, instead, find ways to monitor corporate clients for errant product IDs floating around outside the bounds of a corporate purchasers' license terms.
I would suspect that Microsoft could easily come up with some way to monitor an individual corporate license being used during product updates. Maybe they keep a head count of how many licensed copies are out there under a particular company's account. When 2041 licenses are detected for a corporate account of only 1000 licenses, Microsoft will skip going after the pirates and basically take the issue to the company in terms of fines and/or a nice big Microsoft bill.
Could they do it with IPs? Make each company register a domain and/or IP range for corporate clients? Probably not, given that corporate clients could be working mobilely and the prospect of spoofing. But perhaps they could account for that and start issuing a set # of desktop licenses (that don't move) and a set # of laptop/mobile licenses that can move off the network. A little harder to say "you gave out more product IDs/licenses than allowed," but still a means of tracking licenses outside a set number of mobile clients. There would most likely be a threshold of, say, 20% more than the license limit before the company got called on it.
I could see this as Microsoft's wakeup call to its corporate customers. Control your licenses, or you will be charged/fined accordingly. It might hurt business for Microsoft and cause some changeover to other systems, but for the most part, businesses are going to have to do business with software that meets their needs. And as long as Microsoft is the dominant player in the corporate world for desktop computing, businesses will have to make the effort to meet their licensing demands.
IronChefMorimoto
From the CNET story headline:
u percomputer/2100-1016_3-5426091.html?tag=nefd.top)
e nnington.html) onsite to help with the installation upgrades?
"The fastest Mac supercomputer has gotten faster, thanks to an Xserve makeover." (http://news.com.com/Virginia+Tech+beefs+up+Mac+s
Was that neurotic TLC-to-ABC crossover Ty Pennington (http://abc.go.com/primetime/xtremehome/bios/ty_p
Sorry -- this post was in honor of my wife, who tortures me with that damned show every Sunday night.
IronChefMorimoto
If I were you guys, I wouldn't be calling their supercomputer a "Hokie supercomputer." Some of them thar Virginians might get a wee rankled thinkin' you said "Hokey supercomputer," and 12+ teraflops ain't too hokey. Who says? The end of my buckshot Blue Ridge rifle, that's who!
;-)
IronChefMorimoto
P.S. - Take my word on this as an ex-North Carolinian-- I called an Appalachian State University server farm rather "dairy" and nearly got my ass shot off.
I'm not a rocket scientist, or I'd have something more informative to say.
I did skim over the Wikipedia article, though, and I was curious -- the impression given is that these sorts of rocket engines can't escape Earth gravity and would have to be put together in orbit (again -- going strictly by Wikipedia article on subject).
I have 2 questions. First, if you build it in space, and you make it to Mars, would you have enough thrust in the lower gravity of Mars to lift off again with a full payload, say, of people and Mars rocks? Would a Mars lander be required with conventional rockets to get back to a control vehicle?
My second question is -- how the hell would they put this together at a reasonable cost in space? The Russians blew the hell out of their Mir space station at least a few times. And I seem to remember that the new ISS crew nearly rammed the hell out of the space station when they hooked up with the station last week. Feel free to pile on with other minor news stories about lost tools, broken this and that, etc. with the ISS.
And you want politicians with money from taxpayers to approve funding for NASA to build something "nuclear" in orbit with this kind of scary news history? I have full faith that NASA or an international consortium could make it work, but what about Joe Public, the environmentally-motivated voter, who fears a mushroom cloud screwing up astronomy night for his kids?
Finally, and this is most important -- with this nuclear rocket engine, would the guy from Sliders and Gary Sinise be able to save Tim Robbins before he burned up in the Mars atmosphere?
IronChefMorimoto
I wanted to chime in here. My friend and I put together HIS Zalman Reserator (not mine -- got no extra money for these things) and Antec Aria SFF PC a few weeks ago with tremendous results. The Zalman Reserator retails for $250 at Frys. Most online vendors charge more for it.
It's basically a 2.5' tall heatsink/radiator with a submerged pump. It includes a waterblock for your processor (Intel and AMD) and all the tubing/hardware you need.
You lose the ability to easily bleed the thing, although clamping off hoses and pouring nearly 3 liters of water out the top of a Reserator doesn't really seem all that troublesome to me.
Bottom line -- he dropped his idle temps by 20C and his load temps by a similar amount. This was a few weeks ago when it was slightly warmer here in Georgia. He now idles (running a P4 Prescott) at about 27C. It's pretty amazing.
For more information, see here:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=783557
IronChefMorimoto
For Christ's sake -- it's friggin' water. You drink water because you're thirsty. You don't drink water because you want it to taste this way or that. If you do, then you're drinking tea. Or soda. Or beer. Or dirty water.
And that's really the issue here -- is it DIRTY? HORRORS! Could it have been pissed, pooped, or fish fucked in? Christ -- every drop of water on this planet, I would think given my crappy government school science class-based environmental education, has been pissed, pooped, or fish fucked in at some point.
Taste is only a factor if the damned H2O doesn't taste like, well, H20 -- that taste is called WATER. There is no variant to it, unless it's dirty.
I don't see what the damned big deal is. They're recycling. Enjoy their efforts.
IronChefMorimoto
Um, I officially want to call bullshit on this on behalf of all men on the planet stuck in offices that are blisteringly hot...because of women who DO NOT LIKE TO BE COLD.
This study should've gone further and broken down the data on gender, because I have yet to find a guy in the various offices that I've worked in that thought the temps in the office were TOO COLD to WORK PRODUCTIVELY.
On the contrary, I've had nearly drop-down-dragged-out fights with the ladies in offices where I've worked because of the thermostat. No -- I'm not a violent man -- I'm not putting smackdown on cold female co-workers. I'm talking about insidious "cold war" (no pun intended) tactics -- surreptitiously bumping UP/DOWN the thermostat on the way to the can; taking informal "polls" asking how COLD people think the office is; etc.
The only way I've found to combat the never ending "cold ware" in my office is to basically lay down the equivalent of mutually assured grossing out. I basically tell the ladies in the office whining about the cold that I can either take of my shirt to stay cool and let them turn up the heat, or they can put on more clothing.
Man boobs are a powerful weapon in the hands of the right male.
IronChefMorimoto
While this sounds very interesting (have to re-take all those networking certification exams again, I guess), when I read this...
...my eyes told my brain this...
The guy who started it, Petar Maymounkov, is of Kademlia fame."
The guy who started it, Petar Maymounkov, is of Chlamydia fame."
I was about to wonder what sort of "fame" you could get from that. Need coffee. Need sleep.
IronChefMorimoto
Maybe I'm just missing something here, but it sounds like some ID theft fucker(s) stole 1.4 million SS#s for the elderly and welfare types.
Way to hack those social security checks and food stamps, morons.
IronChefMorimoto
I only had time to read Anandtech's preview this morning for the nForce4 chipsets, and I wasn't sure that the Ultra and SLI chipsets would be made available for Socket 754 A64 CPUs.
I checked Nvidia's website for information on this, and I found tech specs for each chipset:
nForce4 - http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_20041014863476.html
nForce4 Ultra - http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_20041015990644.html
nForce4 SLI - http://www.nvidia.com/page/pg_20041015917263.html
As you can see -- no specifics on the socket support. I'm wondering if this will be at the discretion of the motherboard manufacturers. My hope is that Nvidia will encourage both Socket 754 and Socket 939 variants of the motherboards with these chipsets.
I'm an owner of a Socket 754 CPU, and I know that a lot of friends invested money as early adopters of the A64 CPU in these Socket 754 platforms. I unloaded nearly $375 for my Socket 754 A64 before AMD started cutting prices and introducing the early, and very expensive, Socket 939 CPUs.
That's an investment that I can't just shirk off in order to take advantage of a much less expensive chipset/motherboard upgrade for, say, $125 for a top tier nForce4 motherboard (just guessing at the pricing here -- don't take it literally).
IronChefMorimoto
Heh -- the coverage on Google starting a brower here, developing an IM client there, evaluating the Internet 3 here (gotchya!), etc. is getting a little nuts. I'm starting to see Google-this and Google-that everywhere. Kind of like Starbucks.
Google AdSense ads on every website I visit now. Google in my browser toolbar (my fault). Google gmail account suffixes in my e-mail client. Google showing up every 3rd or 4th story on Slashdot. My boss asking ME about researching Google paid advertising for our web clients.
Honestly, though -- it's neat to have a company with this sort of mystique around again. Those Segway people ruined their suspense when Joan Lunden nearly broke her neck during the TV morning show demonstration of the product. The lovely folks manufacturing those Crusoe processors have done delightlfully boring stuff with their systems (how come I ain't seeing non-obscure Japanese variants of laptops NOT running Intel processors at Best Buy?). And now that Carmack has released Doom3...it's on to another game.
Way to go Google -- just give us a heads up when you start opening a retail Google Country search engine store next to the Wal-Mart Supercenter in my NC hometown. The Starbucks there sort of spooked the natives. But they like it now -- they've assimilated nicely the frappacinos and espressos into their routine. Plus, the Starbucks cups hold more tobacco spit than the ones from McDonald's.
IronChefMorimoto
I seem to remember reading an AutoWeek article about 2 years ago about the time that DaimlerChrysler's Jeep divison introduced the Jeep Liberty small SUV.
1
3
I opened my mail, and I saw this full page cover photo on this weekly auto magazine showing a Jeep Liberty tipping over during a slalom test. An inset picture showed the friggin' car flipped over on its side, if I remember correctly. I'm posting from work, so read for yourself:
http://www.autoweek.com/article.cms?articleId=333
Turns out, AutoWeek testers were doing their standard lane change avoidance/slalom test that they do with everything from Hyundais to GMC Yukons. I'm pretty sure it was a production Jeep Liberty -- nothing pre-production -- that flipped over twice (???) and landed on its side during this relatively commonplace automotive review test.
The driver, thankfully, only suffered a sore neck (nearly broke it, if it had rolled one more time), and AutoWeek devoted their entire issue to this vehicle which had been designed to put an affordable small SUV Jeep into the hands of consumers.
DaimlerChrysler balked and basically claimed that THE TEST WAS NOT A REAL WORLD TEST. AutoWeek called bullshit and basically said, "Uh, yeah it is -- if a driver has to make a quick lane change and or dodge something in the road, it's as real world as it gets."
http://www.autoweek.com/article.cms?articleId=416
I seem to remember that DaimlerChrysler continued to balk at the test, but in fact they ended up making center of gravity changes to the vehicle (suspension and ride height, perhaps?) over the course of the next model year.
Sounds like the same crap that Renault is doing here.
It's funny -- the automotive press gets touted all the time when they LOVE a car and try and hype up the manufacturers' products, but heaven forbid that they also try and save the manufacturer a little legal trouble by finding out these sorts of dangerous rollover issues and what not in pre-production cars. Only the GOOD NEWS, right? Bullshit.
IronChefMorimoto
Sadly, I had no idea that I was competing against you for Karma. Thanks to the FAQ, I'm still pretty much confused. Continue to whore if it makes you happy, but if I'm an indirect Kharma pimp, I expect my cut, bitch. ;-)
IronChefMorimoto
If you can't afford this Cray, you can at least buy the parts to start putting together your own multi-processor Opteron system:
:-\
http://www.monarchcomputer.com/
A friend of mine and I were talking the other night about local Atlanta, GA computer stores, and he mentioned that Monarch Computer is one of the only vendors from whom you can purchase the 4-way Opteron 800 series processors ($1200 a piece -- damn!).
He's been in grad school out of state for a few years and was suprised to learn that Monarch Computer is, in fact, in his hometown backyard. Kind of kewl to walk in a store in your own town and walk out with a $1200 4-way processor.
Until the wife finds out and sends you back to said store with the receipt in hand for a refund.
IronChefMorimoto
P.S. - I don't work for these guys or advocate their store. I just thought it was cool to have such a vendor nearby. Too bad they don't sell Shuttle XPCs.
DOH! Sorry about that. It scrolled offscreen before I saw it, and I had just read the Anandtech.com article before posting my comment in the Doom3 area. My bad, but hey -- at least people who missed it onscreen yesterday and look at it again. ;-)
IronChefMorimoto
As a nice companion to this Doom3 Linux release, there's also a Linux gaming benchmark article on Anandtech.com this morning:
9
http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.aspx?i=222
It's more of an AGP GPU on Linux comparison, but the information on some of the setup was, for a Linux newbie like me, a little informative. I had considered doing a Linux installation on my A64 gaming machine (using a separate hard drive) and installing some of the Linux versions of games that are mentioned in the article.
I'm curious, though -- do most of the mainstream game Linux versions come on the CD-ROM or have to be downloaded from the developer? Doom3, for example, requires the Windows CD for adding some files to the Linux installation. Enemy Territory is standalone. What about Jedi Knights: Jedi Academy, as mentioned in the Anandtech article? On the CD-ROM? Or a free download without requiring anything from the original Windows CD-ROM?
Anyway -- a good article. I enjoyed seeing information about gaming on Linux. Now, I just gotta get an Nvidia card so I don't have to struggle as a Linux newbie with the ATI driver installation.
IronChefMorimoto