I have no interest in a video or audio ipod, nor do I have interest in this. Why should i? If I want an MP3 player I'll get a much cheaper generic one that is less likely to be stolen and doesn't involve brand name price inflation. If I want a portable video player I'll get a PSP and hack it.
If by 'hacking', you mean: insert a memory card with a movie on it and click 'play', then by all means, hack away mr. hacker!
I agree with you. The shop I used to work at charged a minimum of $125 for backup/restoration of client applications because of the amount of time spent "installing" their old apps backed up from a broken copy of Windows and they never had the source media. This meant copying the files over and tooling around in the registry until things worked properly. Maybe 1-2 hours there.
The problem with Geek Squad, they are a branch off a publically held company. Instead of long-term customer satisfaction, they are driven my quarterly stock gains. This is no suprise, as this is how business works nowadays. If you can get a pseudogeek to make 80% of customers happy, and pay him $7/hr to do it, that is more short-term gain than paying $25/hr on someone that'll make 99% of the customers happy.
So, you own a DVD player by now, right? It really shouldn't matter as long as you put a disc in and a movie player. Time will pass, prices will eventually drop to $100, and hacks/mods will be abundant. No reason to be the 15th person in the thread to bandwagon on about DRM and region locks. Nobody cares.
Actually, if you go to zones where there are good grinding spots for level 50+ characters, you will often find clients running completely automated. They basically run between different points, then once the bot application detects aggro, it tells the client to attack.
If you see these, it is obvious. All you have to do is run right in front of the bot, hit the mob one time, then allow the bot to kill it. You get all the experience and the loot for making first contact. If there was a human manning the client, they would immediately start yelling about stealing their mobs, a bot though, will continue it's pattern for hours and never say a peep.
Usually, when I find ones of opposing faction, I will kill it, then sit on the corpse, repeatedly killing it until it finally stops showing up. This often happens after an hour, or so, as I think the ghost may get stuck on terrain sometimes and never get close enough to resurect. Other options are to use a mind control hat and jump off a cliff with it in tow.
I have a SamSung upscaling DVD player with HDMI output. Quite honestly, any flat panel TV is going to already do this to display a 480p image on a 720p/1080 display, so there is no difference whether the scaler is enabled on the player or not.
This might do something if you have an old CRT hdtv, but I really don't see how there could be much improvement. It's kind of like taking a 128k mp3 file, opening it in some audio tools, then saving it at 256k. You can't ever get back the missing bits.
Planetside is like this. The only grinding you do is for rank, which involves killing lots of other players and capturing bases. I enjoyed it for a while, but left due to a lack of bug fixes and content updates. Oh god, and the nerfs. It seemed like they would nerf anything someone complained about in the forums, legit or not. I remember logging in one day and it suddenly took like 20 grenades to take down a single soldier, 4 shots with a sniper rifle, etc. All in the name of balanced play.
Not if you trim out the extra sound tracks and special features. Most movies do not exceed 120 minutes.
Out of my home movie collection's backups, I've only had to compress a few titles to fit. This is usually only slight compression (5-15%) to get them to fit. Considering many of the originals were compiled with software less modern than what I'm recompressing them with, I don't see what all the fuss is about.
I watch movies 5' away from a Sony 40" LCD panel, so I think I would notice degraded quality more than folks using SD CRTs.
You also do not know if this was the full movie, or just a few chapters for use as a visual demo. Recall how someone else who made assumptions about a situation came across looking like a giant jackass? Assumptions have a tendancy to do that.
Anyway, what sort of character goes to a party, spots what he thinks is a big scandal, then doesn't have the social skills to talk about it with anyone there? I would have immediately asked the guys who set the boxes up what method they used to put the video on that DVDR and if the whole movie was there (being 119 minutes, it would have fit with no compression if they ditched the extras -- what I would have done if all I planned on doing was running it as a looped demo). It's not like doing so would have been anything more than just chit chat. I guess this is a big lesson to those who read and believe things "tech journalists" write, as a large chunk appear to write out of their ass (ie, Devorak).
The fact still remains that Sony's "comparison" laptop was playing a DVD+R for comparison, not the production DVD.
I get so tired of hearing this hogwash. This isn't video cassette. The movie's total run time is 119 minutes, so it will fit on a standard DVD+/-R without any further compression.
I know it is popular to pick on Sony on here the past couple of weeks, but at least have your facts in order before trolling.
Okay, I don't know why our poster thinks engaget is the "general concensus", perhaps he finds their comments section mentally stimulating (click the link in the headline and scroll down).
Regardless if this was faked or not, I don't trust all these band-wagoning fools here or there. All you have to do is read my previous posts that were modded as troll, flame, etc when I predicted a fiaso with Sony's Blu-ray and PS3 releases. People saw big numbers, wanted big numbers, and completely forgot about Sony's failures in the past.
Kind of reminds me of the idiocy supporting support for multiple wars a couple of years ago. People like to believe things and completely turn off the part of their brain that comprehends history's lessons.
I LOVE BF2. I *CRAVE* the experience...it's even more addicting than BF1942 was. But I quit playing, because I have standards. I am NOT going to upgrade to 2GB RAM just to "fix" THEIR problem.
I only have 1GB and have never had an issue. Before swinging your e-penis around on forums, you should probably take some time to investigate your PC. Noob.
Also, how exactly are you teaching EA a lesson by giving them $60 and not playing the game?
Maybe the story should have started with "If you live in Britain and...". If you're an American this article is worthless to you.
Also, if you prefer to base your higher-end electronic purchasing decisions on the opinions of a writer able to better communicate a positive situation than simply saying "kick-ass" over and over, then this article probably isn't for you.
Here we go with the comparisons and "in depth analysis" between things on the market and things yet to be on the market. The headline is no more, or less, than trollbait for those who feel the desire to stroke their ego about hating Microsoft. Do it with elegance, and you might find yourself +5 Insightful!
In reality, nobody knows where the console market is going. The meat of the buyers will be those who thought one commercial or advertising campaign was better than the other. Much like how Sony was able to compete last time around with a very underpowered GPU due to Microsoft's total lack of PR/ad campaigns combined with a lower retail price.
Actually, screens on cell phones and mobile devices are getting bigger and brighter, with more pixels all the time. The only reason the whole thing isn't one big touch-sensitive plasma or lcd display is the fact that it is too expensive right now.
The question becomes, now that this technology is cheaper, will my VP be buying new Windows Mobile enabled cell phones for his entire department just so we can put in more hours?"
I doubt you'll even get one, being first tier phone support and all.
Yeah, I remember getting chewed out by many o slashdotters by posting how the patent costs of Blu-Ray would make HD-DVD a more viable option. Anyway, those costs are not going to drop for a while. You might as well quit blindly supporting a closed format for whatever reasons.
Also, DVDs didn't cost $25 back in 1997. They were about the same price they are today.
Besides, only a few channels are available in HD from the local cableco. They market this stuff with the "future" in mind. But as the article shows, the future will involve something different than you can buy today. If you're going to buy this stuff anyway, I'd make sure it has some immediate value today and not believe a word about what they plan to do next year or even next week. Me? I've got HDTV DVR capability on my PC today, and it's really not that useful. It is fun to show people the picture quality of HD, but beyond that it's just too much data.
What about those of us with about 20 HD channels and showtime, hbo, cinemax, etc? It's not the future for us. I've got a Comcast DVR, which sucks compared to the other DVRs I've had, but you can easily leech the video off the firewire port if you really need to get more than 10-12 hours of 1080i programming stored.
I don't use cygwin for perl, but I do use it for shell scripting in Windows. Mind you, nothing I've done is very portable, but it is easier since I grew up on bash scripting.:)
Combine with WinMacro, or another windows-native automator and you can make some very crazy creations that were never meant to exist.
This is rather old news. Over a decade ago, AOL outsourced their call centers to the lowest bidders, thus only having to pay near-minimum wage for the same thing a less rural area would require $10-12/hr.
Columbia House has done this for over twenty years, setting up their operations in places like Terre Haute, IN simply because it had one of the lowest incomes per capita in the nation.
I think it is more likely "Tech" will save small town India in this day and age.
You knew when you posted it the answer would be a glaring "No, slower doesn't mean more secure."
Then again, a lot of folks around here get modded up while trying to argue how it is a god-given right they have untethered smtp access to and from anywhere regarding their workstation at the office.
Using that logic, we would have to ban game consoles and games on PCs.
It is so rare that someone uses a video game as an excuse to commit a crime, and often, it looks more like a desparate move to get conservative lobbyists and leaders to blow things out of proportion in order to obtain negative media attention for "violent/wreckless" games they oppose on spiritual or moral values. Much like when those kids in Florida recently said GTA made them go out shooting people. Only a few people actually believed that, but they may have thought the media attention would make the criminals look like victims on some level, thus obtaining a lighter sentence when it comes time for the court decision.
Regarding the GTA case, I think the issue was bad parents since the game clearly stated it was not for young children, but older teens, who have hopefully developed standards and a sense of reality by that age.
Today we have news that Dell is not going to support HD-DVD, despite reported incentives that recently induced HP to do so.
First off, this is because Dell is in on the advisory staff that came up with the Blu-ray spec. They have never said "No we are going to sell it", they have only taken the safe road in saying they will stick with their design until the market says otherwise. This probably won't take long since you won't be paying for the patent license at $30 a unit like you will with the Blu-ray product. Not to mention, media will end up costing less for the Microsoft product based upon the same premise.
Yes, Microsoft is trying to get in quick with the incentives, but that is only because they don't have quite the advantage of having Sony on their side. Sony/Dell/and company are going to end up losing out in the long-run for the excessive patent fees. Pair that with Sony being the biggest single contributor to our RIAA pains, and you don't have a great deal of support for the company.
I'm not saying Microsoft is great, just saying they'll be less likely to sue folks for utilizing methods to backup/copy their discs.
This is so dangerous. People who play good racing games and leave to take their car, will so quickly think they are back in their game and speed up. This has happenend to a good friend of mine. Never had a speeding ticket... plays one long session of Gotham racing. Heads home... and get's his driving license suspended due to his speed.
Yeah, I often take my 12 gauge out and shoot a bunch of people right after a good game of counter-strike. Then, I go play some Monopoly and find myself buying out all the local businesses the next morning.:rollseyes:
Your friend is a moron if he was that easily influenced. I play console racers for hours and hours at a time, then when I drive home, I obey the speed limit. Just because you feel slower in a real car, doesn't mean you have also lost your vision and can no longer read the gauges.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no interest in a video or audio ipod, nor do I have interest in this. Why should i? If I want an MP3 player I'll get a much cheaper generic one that is less likely to be stolen and doesn't involve brand name price inflation. If I want a portable video player I'll get a PSP and hack it.
If by 'hacking', you mean: insert a memory card with a movie on it and click 'play', then by all means, hack away mr. hacker!
I agree with you. The shop I used to work at charged a minimum of $125 for backup/restoration of client applications because of the amount of time spent "installing" their old apps backed up from a broken copy of Windows and they never had the source media. This meant copying the files over and tooling around in the registry until things worked properly. Maybe 1-2 hours there.
The problem with Geek Squad, they are a branch off a publically held company. Instead of long-term customer satisfaction, they are driven my quarterly stock gains. This is no suprise, as this is how business works nowadays. If you can get a pseudogeek to make 80% of customers happy, and pay him $7/hr to do it, that is more short-term gain than paying $25/hr on someone that'll make 99% of the customers happy.
So, you own a DVD player by now, right? It really shouldn't matter as long as you put a disc in and a movie player. Time will pass, prices will eventually drop to $100, and hacks/mods will be abundant. No reason to be the 15th person in the thread to bandwagon on about DRM and region locks. Nobody cares.
Actually, if you go to zones where there are good grinding spots for level 50+ characters, you will often find clients running completely automated. They basically run between different points, then once the bot application detects aggro, it tells the client to attack.
If you see these, it is obvious. All you have to do is run right in front of the bot, hit the mob one time, then allow the bot to kill it. You get all the experience and the loot for making first contact. If there was a human manning the client, they would immediately start yelling about stealing their mobs, a bot though, will continue it's pattern for hours and never say a peep.
Usually, when I find ones of opposing faction, I will kill it, then sit on the corpse, repeatedly killing it until it finally stops showing up. This often happens after an hour, or so, as I think the ghost may get stuck on terrain sometimes and never get close enough to resurect. Other options are to use a mind control hat and jump off a cliff with it in tow.
I have a SamSung upscaling DVD player with HDMI output. Quite honestly, any flat panel TV is going to already do this to display a 480p image on a 720p/1080 display, so there is no difference whether the scaler is enabled on the player or not.
This might do something if you have an old CRT hdtv, but I really don't see how there could be much improvement. It's kind of like taking a 128k mp3 file, opening it in some audio tools, then saving it at 256k. You can't ever get back the missing bits.
Planetside is like this. The only grinding you do is for rank, which involves killing lots of other players and capturing bases. I enjoyed it for a while, but left due to a lack of bug fixes and content updates. Oh god, and the nerfs. It seemed like they would nerf anything someone complained about in the forums, legit or not. I remember logging in one day and it suddenly took like 20 grenades to take down a single soldier, 4 shots with a sniper rifle, etc. All in the name of balanced play.
Not if you trim out the extra sound tracks and special features. Most movies do not exceed 120 minutes.
Out of my home movie collection's backups, I've only had to compress a few titles to fit. This is usually only slight compression (5-15%) to get them to fit. Considering many of the originals were compiled with software less modern than what I'm recompressing them with, I don't see what all the fuss is about.
I watch movies 5' away from a Sony 40" LCD panel, so I think I would notice degraded quality more than folks using SD CRTs.
You also do not know if this was the full movie, or just a few chapters for use as a visual demo. Recall how someone else who made assumptions about a situation came across looking like a giant jackass? Assumptions have a tendancy to do that.
Anyway, what sort of character goes to a party, spots what he thinks is a big scandal, then doesn't have the social skills to talk about it with anyone there? I would have immediately asked the guys who set the boxes up what method they used to put the video on that DVDR and if the whole movie was there (being 119 minutes, it would have fit with no compression if they ditched the extras -- what I would have done if all I planned on doing was running it as a looped demo). It's not like doing so would have been anything more than just chit chat. I guess this is a big lesson to those who read and believe things "tech journalists" write, as a large chunk appear to write out of their ass (ie, Devorak).
The fact still remains that Sony's "comparison" laptop was playing a DVD+R for comparison, not the production DVD.
I get so tired of hearing this hogwash. This isn't video cassette. The movie's total run time is 119 minutes, so it will fit on a standard DVD+/-R without any further compression.
I know it is popular to pick on Sony on here the past couple of weeks, but at least have your facts in order before trolling.
Okay, I don't know why our poster thinks engaget is the "general concensus", perhaps he finds their comments section mentally stimulating (click the link in the headline and scroll down).
Regardless if this was faked or not, I don't trust all these band-wagoning fools here or there. All you have to do is read my previous posts that were modded as troll, flame, etc when I predicted a fiaso with Sony's Blu-ray and PS3 releases. People saw big numbers, wanted big numbers, and completely forgot about Sony's failures in the past.
Kind of reminds me of the idiocy supporting support for multiple wars a couple of years ago. People like to believe things and completely turn off the part of their brain that comprehends history's lessons.
I LOVE BF2. I *CRAVE* the experience...it's even more addicting than BF1942 was. But I quit playing, because I have standards. I am NOT going to upgrade to 2GB RAM just to "fix" THEIR problem.
I only have 1GB and have never had an issue. Before swinging your e-penis around on forums, you should probably take some time to investigate your PC. Noob.
Also, how exactly are you teaching EA a lesson by giving them $60 and not playing the game?
Maybe the story should have started with "If you live in Britain and...". If you're an American this article is worthless to you.
Also, if you prefer to base your higher-end electronic purchasing decisions on the opinions of a writer able to better communicate a positive situation than simply saying "kick-ass" over and over, then this article probably isn't for you.
Here we go with the comparisons and "in depth analysis" between things on the market and things yet to be on the market. The headline is no more, or less, than trollbait for those who feel the desire to stroke their ego about hating Microsoft. Do it with elegance, and you might find yourself +5 Insightful!
In reality, nobody knows where the console market is going. The meat of the buyers will be those who thought one commercial or advertising campaign was better than the other. Much like how Sony was able to compete last time around with a very underpowered GPU due to Microsoft's total lack of PR/ad campaigns combined with a lower retail price.
Actually, screens on cell phones and mobile devices are getting bigger and brighter, with more pixels all the time. The only reason the whole thing isn't one big touch-sensitive plasma or lcd display is the fact that it is too expensive right now.
Unfortunately, it'll be playing DVD quality after the HD-DVD player makes its way into many homes.
Why blow all that money on SLI when you can get a 7800 for $300 less than a dual card config and get 20% more performance?
The question becomes, now that this technology is cheaper, will my VP be buying new Windows Mobile enabled cell phones for his entire department just so we can put in more hours?"
I doubt you'll even get one, being first tier phone support and all.
Yeah, I remember getting chewed out by many o slashdotters by posting how the patent costs of Blu-Ray would make HD-DVD a more viable option. Anyway, those costs are not going to drop for a while. You might as well quit blindly supporting a closed format for whatever reasons.
Also, DVDs didn't cost $25 back in 1997. They were about the same price they are today.
This just reminds me of all those times I said Google would eventually suck and turn evil, intentionally or not, and got modded as a troll.
Besides, only a few channels are available in HD from the local cableco. They market this stuff with the "future" in mind. But as the article shows, the future will involve something different than you can buy today. If you're going to buy this stuff anyway, I'd make sure it has some immediate value today and not believe a word about what they plan to do next year or even next week. Me? I've got HDTV DVR capability on my PC today, and it's really not that useful. It is fun to show people the picture quality of HD, but beyond that it's just too much data.
What about those of us with about 20 HD channels and showtime, hbo, cinemax, etc? It's not the future for us. I've got a Comcast DVR, which sucks compared to the other DVRs I've had, but you can easily leech the video off the firewire port if you really need to get more than 10-12 hours of 1080i programming stored.
I don't use cygwin for perl, but I do use it for shell scripting in Windows. Mind you, nothing I've done is very portable, but it is easier since I grew up on bash scripting. :)
Combine with WinMacro, or another windows-native automator and you can make some very crazy creations that were never meant to exist.
This is rather old news. Over a decade ago, AOL outsourced their call centers to the lowest bidders, thus only having to pay near-minimum wage for the same thing a less rural area would require $10-12/hr.
Columbia House has done this for over twenty years, setting up their operations in places like Terre Haute, IN simply because it had one of the lowest incomes per capita in the nation.
I think it is more likely "Tech" will save small town India in this day and age.
This isn't a very nerdy headline, dear slashdot.
You knew when you posted it the answer would be a glaring "No, slower doesn't mean more secure."
Then again, a lot of folks around here get modded up while trying to argue how it is a god-given right they have untethered smtp access to and from anywhere regarding their workstation at the office.
Using that logic, we would have to ban game consoles and games on PCs.
It is so rare that someone uses a video game as an excuse to commit a crime, and often, it looks more like a desparate move to get conservative lobbyists and leaders to blow things out of proportion in order to obtain negative media attention for "violent/wreckless" games they oppose on spiritual or moral values. Much like when those kids in Florida recently said GTA made them go out shooting people. Only a few people actually believed that, but they may have thought the media attention would make the criminals look like victims on some level, thus obtaining a lighter sentence when it comes time for the court decision.
Regarding the GTA case, I think the issue was bad parents since the game clearly stated it was not for young children, but older teens, who have hopefully developed standards and a sense of reality by that age.
Today we have news that Dell is not going to support HD-DVD, despite reported incentives that recently induced HP to do so.
First off, this is because Dell is in on the advisory staff that came up with the Blu-ray spec. They have never said "No we are going to sell it", they have only taken the safe road in saying they will stick with their design until the market says otherwise. This probably won't take long since you won't be paying for the patent license at $30 a unit like you will with the Blu-ray product. Not to mention, media will end up costing less for the Microsoft product based upon the same premise.
Yes, Microsoft is trying to get in quick with the incentives, but that is only because they don't have quite the advantage of having Sony on their side. Sony/Dell/and company are going to end up losing out in the long-run for the excessive patent fees. Pair that with Sony being the biggest single contributor to our RIAA pains, and you don't have a great deal of support for the company.
I'm not saying Microsoft is great, just saying they'll be less likely to sue folks for utilizing methods to backup/copy their discs.
This is so dangerous. People who play good racing games and leave to take their car, will so quickly think they are back in their game and speed up. This has happenend to a good friend of mine. Never had a speeding ticket... plays one long session of Gotham racing. Heads home... and get's his driving license suspended due to his speed.
:rollseyes:
Yeah, I often take my 12 gauge out and shoot a bunch of people right after a good game of counter-strike. Then, I go play some Monopoly and find myself buying out all the local businesses the next morning.
Your friend is a moron if he was that easily influenced. I play console racers for hours and hours at a time, then when I drive home, I obey the speed limit. Just because you feel slower in a real car, doesn't mean you have also lost your vision and can no longer read the gauges.