Set up a damn ROAD CONSTRUCTION WEBSITE!
on
WiFi Gone Wild
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This would be GREAT, if they were to set up a damn ROAD CONSTRUCTION WEBSITE.
I'd love to be able to check and say "oh, I-35 is under construction from hither to yonder. Hm, what is my alternate route?" instead of the old "a mile past the last exit you see the ROAD CONSTRUCTION NEXT 50 MILES" sign.
Under Fedora, the single biggest problems I had were:
1) Bitchslapping the system into allowing me to install the RPMs - I had to do a few "rpm --erase --justdb --nodeps" on a few things to "resolve" some conflicts.
2) Removing the/usr/X11R6/lib/tls/libGL* files to get the new Mesa renderer to run.
Other than that, I had very little problem.
I would suggest checking your X executable with ldd (ldd `which X`) and seeing if you are picking up a bad library somewhere.
Perhaps what we need are drugs that do the opposite of the meds they give paranoids - because it sounds to me like the Netgear guys aren't paranoid enough!
There is not enough inforation in the article to judge whether the conclusion is fair or not.
First question: if I enter the T to examine the window, will I come under fire from the turrets?
Second question: Can I look through the window into the room beyond without breaking/opening it? I've not played Deus Ex, but in some games windows can be astonishingly opaque until smashed open.
In a fire situation, you neutralize the threats you can see first, then you look for the threats you couldn't see at first.
Here's roughly how I'd approach something like this:
OK, a T intersection. I can see a window. Crouch, sidle right, look as far left as I can without exposing myself to fire from the right. Hmm, a door. Maybe locked. Maybe has a oogie behind it, waiting for me to make a sound.
Sidle left, look right. Hmm. Lasers and at least one turrent. Will I come under fire if I enter the T? Maybe.
Look at the window. Looks breakable. Seemingly empty room beyond. Of course, there could be 2 oogies with Big Mean Nasty HoleMakers in either corner near me, and a Big Deep Pit With Sharp Pokey Things Of Instant Death just below the window.
OK, so the plan is: dive in left, sweep left to check for something in the corner, and then spin to check the turrets. If I come under fire, dive back out, attempting to take out one turret on the way. If nothing happens, check the door. OK, here goes...
At this point, if I start taking fire from the turrets I will HAVE to deal with them. IF this is how the setup worked it is little wonder most people dealt with the turrets first!
I want to see this applied to OmniMAX and IMAX films.
My biggest problem with [Omni|I]MAX is that at 24fps, scenes with slow pans get very jumpy (fast pans blur enough to not be noticable). However, if you just ran the film at 60fps, the size of the reels would be unmanagiable, and the speed of the film through the transport would be dangerous!
But imagine a [Omni|I]MAX theater with 100TB of storage (not a big deal nowadays) and a DMD/DLV projector at these kinds of resolutions and refresh rates. They could play any movie they have pretty much instantly, they could have longer running movies, and the movies would be absolutely immersive (esp. for OmniMAX movies - on a 120 degree screen pretty much your entire field of view would be the movie.)
Of course, they'd need to make sure people understood the "If you feel yourself getting sick, just CLOSE YOUR EYES AND BREATH!" a bit more.
I've never been Down Under, but I have driving in England. I found the motorways to be not much different than the interstates (other than the side of the road you are on, and on the divided highway/dual carriageway roads that isn't as much of an issue).
True, when you get OFF the motorways onto the local roads things are different (and with 20+ years of driving on the right, it is NOT something I want to do when tired).
Perhaps what needs to happen here is that somebody with good bandwidth needs to create a time-lapse road website, and folks can upload the video there.
I'd have to run US160 from Medicine Lodge to Coldwater.
The problem with capital punishment are that (1) it's irreversible, and (2) it is dangerous to give governments that kind of power.
By those criteria imprisoning somebody is wrong, as well - if you lock me up for a year, that is a year of my life you CANNOT give back - a year of memories of dehumanizing experiences, a year of my (S.O.|Children|Pets|Business) that I could not experience.
If one were to rigorously apply those criteria, then the only punishment that is allowed would be fines - repayable with interest upon an overturned conviction.
Yes, it is such a shame they are shoveling all those dollar bills aboard a rocket and shooting them into space, never to be seen again, rather than spending them here on earth.
What?
You mean, they *do* spend them here on earth? That they are going to pay people here on earth? That those people have jobs because of this?
and simply means that for every credit, there must be a corrisponding debit.
As a result, if you sum all the books, the answer should be 0.00 - if it is NOT, then there was a misentry somewhere.
For example, using GnuCash, every time I get paid, an entry debiting an account called "Paycheck" is created, and an entry crediting "Checking" is created, and the two entries are tied together. So over time the "Paycheck" account grows more and more negative. However, this allows me to see exactly how much I've been paid over time.
It's a form of error dectection and correction.
I've a cousin who is a certified bookkeeper and how has been a comptroller for several small companies - I told her about GnuCash and she was VERY interested. Pity I cannot convert her system to Linux at this time, or run GnuCash under Windows (last time I checked).
"Double-booking" is a criminal activity in which a company maintains 2 sets of books (possibly using double-entry bookkeeping on each set), in which one book is the version that gets shown to the auditors and IRS, and one actually has the real facts in it.
I believe what is happening is that the Nautilus team are confusing a "file manager" and a "workspace manager".
In my opinion, what needed to happen was there needed to be 3 seperate programs (sharing much common code, of course):
The first is a desktop manager. It manages the look of the desktop, and any icons on the desktop. It has absolutely no clue about file management, previews, or anything like that. All it knows is "if the user clicks on this icon, I send a Bonobo message of this type". Thus, the icon representing my home directory would be associated with a Bonobo message to the file manager, a click on the printer icon sends a message to a printer manager, and a click on "My Purdy Pitures" sends a message to the workspace manager (see next). Ideally, I can drag "things" from programs onto the desktop - cut a paragraph from a document, drag it to the desktop, cut another paragraph, drag IT to the desktop, etc. Programs can register things with the desktop - a printer queue manager could register a printer icon on the desktop, an MP3 player could create an icon for itself, a download manager could create a place to drop URLs.
The second program is a "workspace manager". It has the idea of a "grouping of things". It uses spatial navigation. Its "groupings of things" can be stored in the file system, or in a database, or whatever. A "My Purdy Pitures" folder might have a list of what pictures I have, no matter where in the file system they are. So could a "My downloads". It can record where the different icons and windows should be. I can drag pictures into it from other places. It does NOT allow me to set attributes or dates.
The last program is the file manager. It should ***MANAGE FILES DAMNIT!***. It does NOT do spatial navigation. It allows me to have as many windows open on a given directory as I have virtual RAM to support. It lets me rename, copy, change attributes. It sorts the items it shows based upon my selections. It lets me mount or unmount file systems.
That way, the Jethros the Gnome team is trying to design for can use the Desktop manager and the Workspace manager, and have a cluttered desktop, and have everything as icons on the desktop. Those of us who have a bit more ability to sort and file can have a clean desktop, with perhaps a couple of workspace objects (my hot tunes, current projects) that are a subset of the world.
OK, to do security one must think like the bad guys. So let us put on our black hats for a moment.
Only fairly well off people will fork over $30 to feed their Internet addiction - most of all the super-type-A types who cannot tell the difference between "being busy" and "being productive".
Most of those people will be running Windows, probably Win98 or WinXP.
So, if I just sit back, wait for them to get their mail, sniff the password they use for email, and then use that password in an attempt to access their computer, I will probably get right in.
Then I can Trojan their machines (for later access to the inside of whatever corporate network they use), download their My Documents folder and desktop, and see what I can dig up.
The beautiful thing about this is that I have every excuse to be close to these people for extended period times, then I get off the plane and go my own way, never to cross the guys path again./me removes black hat
Err http://mirrors.kernel.org fedora/1.93/i386/stable srclist
404 Not Found Hit http://download.fedora.us fedora/1/i386/stable srclist Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora/ 1.93/i386/base/pkglist.os 404 Not Found Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora/ 1.93/i386/base/pkglist.updates 404 Not Found Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora/ 1.93/i386/base/srclist.os 404 Not Found Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora/ 1.93/i386/base/srclist.updates 404 Not Found Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora/ 1.93/i386/base/pkglist.stable 404 Not Found Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora/ 1.93/i386/base/srclist.stable 404 Not Found
I do wish they would put the FC2 stuff on an apt-for-rpm server, as they did with the FC1 stuff.
I really like the combination of Synaptic, apt-for-RPM, and Fedora, but as yet I've not seen any of the FC2 stuff avaiable via apt (yum yes, apt no).
The combination of the meta-data fetching of apt, the transaction rollback of RPM, and the avaiability of UIs like Synaptic is really great for system admin.
Units like this don't generally use a general purpose CPU running the decoder algorithms in software - they have a very small, low-power microcontroller controlling a dedicated decoder chip, which is a DSP with a mask-ROM version of the MP3 algorithm on it.
You cannot simply update a mask-ROM device (unless you are E.T.) - the data is encoded as the presense or absense of metal at a junction of the chip, not charge on a floating gate of a transistor (as in EEPROM/Flash).
Now, if the makers of such decoder chips start shipping chips with the Vorbis algorithm on them, then we might start seeing more small devices like this.
However, IIRC Fraunhoffer has stated that they believe Vorbis infringes on their patents, therefore it is unlikely that they would license the MP3 algorithm to anybody who plans to put it on the same device as Vorbis.
I'd be interested to see how this device solves the problem - are they using a non-mask-ROM DSP, and loading it from an external ROM, or has some company started shipping combination MP3/Vorbis decoders? Or did they just use an embedded device with enough beef to run MP3 and Vorbis directly?
The real problem with real communism
on
Swedish Pirate Demo
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
OK, first of all, let up NOT confuse true Marxist communism with any of what is going on in the world today - China et. al. are as faithful to real Marxism as StarShip Troopers the movie was to the book.
The fundamental limiting factor to Marxism is the idea the "the workers own the means of production", which fails miserably in an Industrial Age society, and implodes in an Information Age society.
Consider a chip fab plant - they cost BILLIONS of dollars to build. Now, how many people work at a chip fab? Even if 10,000 people worked at a fab, that would mean that each worker's portion of the plan would come to about 100,000 dollars. Compare that to a furnature factory - which set of workers has to be worth more?
And that is the key problem - some workers need to be worth more than other workers - anathema to the Marxist. And since things like chip plants, auto (or tractor) factories and suchlike cannot be funded by the workers, *something* must come in to fund them. So you either have a) rich people (again, anathema to Marxists) or b) "The State" come in to create the plants. But if "The State" owns the plant, the workers don't own it, and "The State" is not going to give it up.
That was what prevented the Communist nations from being able to scale - Marxism didn't work, they went to "The State", and inefficency prevented them from getting anywhere.
(-- boy I wish/. would let me put an HR here) That said, I agree with the parent - and this bunch of wastes of flesh are posterchildren for the free rider problem. And even if we assume the cost of copying software is 0, even if we assume that all electronic content should be Free (in the RMS sense), there is still the little problem that you simply cannot say "router = new Cisco; fiber = new Fiber;" - these are physical things that somebody had to expend resouces to create.
In the sense I was using the word "passive" I was referring to the physical level of activity, not the mental - dispite what some people would assert, most video games do not require a great deal of physical extertion (DDR et. al. excluded, of course).
This is an unsurpising result if you think it through.
I would assert the success of a TV show about an activity is inversely propotional to the ease of engaging in that activity at a moment's notice.
Consider travel shows - I can hardly travel 600 miles to visit San Antonio at the drop of a hat. So if there is a show on about what there is to do in San Antonio, I may watch it to see what I might do when I have the time to go there.
Consider fishing shows - going fishing takes a degree of prep time and travel time. I might not have the time to go fishing today, but I might have the time to watch a show about it to fix my Jones'in for fishing.
Consider golf shows - if I am a golfer and I come across a golf show, I might look out the window and say "I'll bet I could get a quick nine in before dinner", but then again, I might not.
Now, in light of those examples, consider a video game show. I am ALREADY in front of the TV - you know, where I would have to be to play a video game. Now, which am I more likely to do if I am a hard-core gamer - watch a TV show about gaming, or switch on my console AND ACTUALLY PLAY A GAME?
In short, who is likely to watch a show about video game play? Just how lazy do you have to be to watch (passively) a show about an activity that is itself fairly passive?
And as far as watching to pick up tips and tricks - there is a better solution for that for most gamers. I'll give you a hint - you're soaking in it!
Slashdot Mirror
This would be GREAT, if they were to set up a damn ROAD CONSTRUCTION WEBSITE.
I'd love to be able to check and say "oh, I-35 is under construction from hither to yonder. Hm, what is my alternate route?" instead of the old "a mile past the last exit you see the ROAD CONSTRUCTION NEXT 50 MILES" sign.
Under Fedora, the single biggest problems I had were:
/usr/X11R6/lib/tls/libGL* files to get the new Mesa renderer to run.
1) Bitchslapping the system into allowing me to install the RPMs - I had to do a few "rpm --erase --justdb --nodeps" on a few things to "resolve" some conflicts.
2) Removing the
Other than that, I had very little problem.
I would suggest checking your X executable with ldd (ldd `which X`) and seeing if you are picking up a bad library somewhere.
No, that is EXACTLY the way I thought.
Sad to say.
Perhaps what we need are drugs that do the opposite of the meds they give paranoids - because it sounds to me like the Netgear guys aren't paranoid enough!
Naw.
Stupidman:Password
Then they will wise up and fix it by removing the usernamd and password altogether.
First question: if I enter the T to examine the window, will I come under fire from the turrets?
Second question: Can I look through the window into the room beyond without breaking/opening it? I've not played Deus Ex, but in some games windows can be astonishingly opaque until smashed open.
In a fire situation, you neutralize the threats you can see first, then you look for the threats you couldn't see at first.
Here's roughly how I'd approach something like this:
At this point, if I start taking fire from the turrets I will HAVE to deal with them. IF this is how the setup worked it is little wonder most people dealt with the turrets first!
I want to see this applied to OmniMAX and IMAX films.
My biggest problem with [Omni|I]MAX is that at 24fps, scenes with slow pans get very jumpy (fast pans blur enough to not be noticable). However, if you just ran the film at 60fps, the size of the reels would be unmanagiable, and the speed of the film through the transport would be dangerous!
But imagine a [Omni|I]MAX theater with 100TB of storage (not a big deal nowadays) and a DMD/DLV projector at these kinds of resolutions and refresh rates. They could play any movie they have pretty much instantly, they could have longer running movies, and the movies would be absolutely immersive (esp. for OmniMAX movies - on a 120 degree screen pretty much your entire field of view would be the movie.)
Of course, they'd need to make sure people understood the "If you feel yourself getting sick, just CLOSE YOUR EYES AND BREATH!" a bit more.
I've never been Down Under, but I have driving in England. I found the motorways to be not much different than the interstates (other than the side of the road you are on, and on the divided highway/dual carriageway roads that isn't as much of an issue).
True, when you get OFF the motorways onto the local roads things are different (and with 20+ years of driving on the right, it is NOT something I want to do when tired).
Perhaps what needs to happen here is that somebody with good bandwidth needs to create a time-lapse road website, and folks can upload the video there.
I'd have to run US160 from Medicine Lodge to Coldwater.
You obviously have never driven I-70 from Salina, KS to just outside Denver, CO.
No hills. Few turns. Nothing but wheat fields for 300 miles.
Every time I have to take that route, I think to myself "It CAN'T be as bad as I remember." About 2 hours in, I say to myself "Yes, IT CAN BE!"
Even with 11G of stories on the MP3 player it drags.
By those criteria imprisoning somebody is wrong, as well - if you lock me up for a year, that is a year of my life you CANNOT give back - a year of memories of dehumanizing experiences, a year of my (S.O.|Children|Pets|Business) that I could not experience.
If one were to rigorously apply those criteria, then the only punishment that is allowed would be fines - repayable with interest upon an overturned conviction.
Let the little shits SEE their brethren being publicly humiliated. Let the little shits SEE that this will follow them for the rest of their lives.
Yes, it is such a shame they are shoveling all those dollar bills aboard a rocket and shooting them into space, never to be seen again, rather than spending them here on earth.
What?
You mean, they *do* spend them here on earth? That they are going to pay people here on earth? That those people have jobs because of this?
The term you are looking for is
double entry bookkeeping
and simply means that for every credit, there must be a corrisponding debit.
As a result, if you sum all the books, the answer should be 0.00 - if it is NOT, then there was a misentry somewhere.
For example, using GnuCash, every time I get paid, an entry debiting an account called "Paycheck" is created, and an entry crediting "Checking" is created, and the two entries are tied together. So over time the "Paycheck" account grows more and more negative. However, this allows me to see exactly how much I've been paid over time.
It's a form of error dectection and correction.
I've a cousin who is a certified bookkeeper and how has been a comptroller for several small companies - I told her about GnuCash and she was VERY interested. Pity I cannot convert her system to Linux at this time, or run GnuCash under Windows (last time I checked).
"Double-booking" is a criminal activity in which a company maintains 2 sets of books (possibly using double-entry bookkeeping on each set), in which one book is the version that gets shown to the auditors and IRS, and one actually has the real facts in it.
I believe what is happening is that the Nautilus team are confusing a "file manager" and a "workspace manager".
In my opinion, what needed to happen was there needed to be 3 seperate programs (sharing much common code, of course):
The first is a desktop manager. It manages the look of the desktop, and any icons on the desktop. It has absolutely no clue about file management, previews, or anything like that. All it knows is "if the user clicks on this icon, I send a Bonobo message of this type". Thus, the icon representing my home directory would be associated with a Bonobo message to the file manager, a click on the printer icon sends a message to a printer manager, and a click on "My Purdy Pitures" sends a message to the workspace manager (see next). Ideally, I can drag "things" from programs onto the desktop - cut a paragraph from a document, drag it to the desktop, cut another paragraph, drag IT to the desktop, etc. Programs can register things with the desktop - a printer queue manager could register a printer icon on the desktop, an MP3 player could create an icon for itself, a download manager could create a place to drop URLs.
The second program is a "workspace manager". It has the idea of a "grouping of things". It uses spatial navigation. Its "groupings of things" can be stored in the file system, or in a database, or whatever. A "My Purdy Pitures" folder might have a list of what pictures I have, no matter where in the file system they are. So could a "My downloads". It can record where the different icons and windows should be. I can drag pictures into it from other places. It does NOT allow me to set attributes or dates.
The last program is the file manager. It should ***MANAGE FILES DAMNIT!*** . It does NOT do spatial navigation. It allows me to have as many windows open on a given directory as I have virtual RAM to support. It lets me rename, copy, change attributes. It sorts the items it shows based upon my selections. It lets me mount or unmount file systems.
That way, the Jethros the Gnome team is trying to design for can use the Desktop manager and the Workspace manager, and have a cluttered desktop, and have everything as icons on the desktop. Those of us who have a bit more ability to sort and file can have a clean desktop, with perhaps a couple of workspace objects (my hot tunes, current projects) that are a subset of the world.
No, I pronounce it correctly as per English rule:
The first vowel is followed by a consonant, so it is short - "ruh"
Ditto for the second vowel: "puh"
Ditto for the third: "tih"
The last part is one of the standard "exception" endings - "shun".
OK, to do security one must think like the bad guys. So let us put on our black hats for a moment.
/me removes black hat
Only fairly well off people will fork over $30 to feed their Internet addiction - most of all the super-type-A types who cannot tell the difference between "being busy" and "being productive".
Most of those people will be running Windows, probably Win98 or WinXP.
So, if I just sit back, wait for them to get their mail, sniff the password they use for email, and then use that password in an attempt to access their computer, I will probably get right in.
Then I can Trojan their machines (for later access to the inside of whatever corporate network they use), download their My Documents folder and desktop, and see what I can dig up.
The beautiful thing about this is that I have every excuse to be close to these people for extended period times, then I get off the plane and go my own way, never to cross the guys path again.
Gosh, I am SO glad I am not in IT management....
Just to make a point:
Pronounce the following:
er
re
Explain to me how you can pronounce "re" as "reee" and "metre" as "meee-tur".
I suppose if the spelling were
metr
then it might make a degree of sense.
Err http://mirrors.kernel.org fedora/1.93/i386/stable srclist/ 1.93/i386/base/pkglist.os 404 Not Found/ 1.93/i386/base/pkglist.updates 404 Not Found/ 1.93/i386/base/srclist.os 404 Not Found/ 1.93/i386/base/srclist.updates 404 Not Found/ 1.93/i386/base/pkglist.stable 404 Not Found/ 1.93/i386/base/srclist.stable 404 Not Found
404 Not Found
Hit http://download.fedora.us fedora/1/i386/stable srclist
Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora
Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora
Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora
Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora
Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora
Failed to fetch http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora.us/fedora/fedora
I do wish they would put the FC2 stuff on an apt-for-rpm server, as they did with the FC1 stuff.
I really like the combination of Synaptic, apt-for-RPM, and Fedora, but as yet I've not seen any of the FC2 stuff avaiable via apt (yum yes, apt no).
The combination of the meta-data fetching of apt, the transaction rollback of RPM, and the avaiability of UIs like Synaptic is really great for system admin.
MS wouldn't touch SCO directly with a ten metre pole.
But Sun, who is in the business of Unix, might....
<shudder>
This news has me smilin' like the Enzyte Guy!
Units like this don't generally use a general purpose CPU running the decoder algorithms in software - they have a very small, low-power microcontroller controlling a dedicated decoder chip, which is a DSP with a mask-ROM version of the MP3 algorithm on it.
You cannot simply update a mask-ROM device (unless you are E.T.) - the data is encoded as the presense or absense of metal at a junction of the chip, not charge on a floating gate of a transistor (as in EEPROM/Flash).
Now, if the makers of such decoder chips start shipping chips with the Vorbis algorithm on them, then we might start seeing more small devices like this.
However, IIRC Fraunhoffer has stated that they believe Vorbis infringes on their patents, therefore it is unlikely that they would license the MP3 algorithm to anybody who plans to put it on the same device as Vorbis.
I'd be interested to see how this device solves the problem - are they using a non-mask-ROM DSP, and loading it from an external ROM, or has some company started shipping combination MP3/Vorbis decoders? Or did they just use an embedded device with enough beef to run MP3 and Vorbis directly?
OK, first of all, let up NOT confuse true Marxist communism with any of what is going on in the world today - China et. al. are as faithful to real Marxism as StarShip Troopers the movie was to the book.
/. would let me put an HR here)
The fundamental limiting factor to Marxism is the idea the "the workers own the means of production", which fails miserably in an Industrial Age society, and implodes in an Information Age society.
Consider a chip fab plant - they cost BILLIONS of dollars to build. Now, how many people work at a chip fab? Even if 10,000 people worked at a fab, that would mean that each worker's portion of the plan would come to about 100,000 dollars. Compare that to a furnature factory - which set of workers has to be worth more?
And that is the key problem - some workers need to be worth more than other workers - anathema to the Marxist. And since things like chip plants, auto (or tractor) factories and suchlike cannot be funded by the workers, *something* must come in to fund them. So you either have a) rich people (again, anathema to Marxists) or b) "The State" come in to create the plants. But if "The State" owns the plant, the workers don't own it, and "The State" is not going to give it up.
That was what prevented the Communist nations from being able to scale - Marxism didn't work, they went to "The State", and inefficency prevented them from getting anywhere.
(-- boy I wish
That said, I agree with the parent - and this bunch of wastes of flesh are posterchildren for the free rider problem. And even if we assume the cost of copying software is 0, even if we assume that all electronic content should be Free (in the RMS sense), there is still the little problem that you simply cannot say "router = new Cisco; fiber = new Fiber;" - these are physical things that somebody had to expend resouces to create.
In the sense I was using the word "passive" I was referring to the physical level of activity, not the mental - dispite what some people would assert, most video games do not require a great deal of physical extertion (DDR et. al. excluded, of course).
This is an unsurpising result if you think it through.
I would assert the success of a TV show about an activity is inversely propotional to the ease of engaging in that activity at a moment's notice.
Consider travel shows - I can hardly travel 600 miles to visit San Antonio at the drop of a hat. So if there is a show on about what there is to do in San Antonio, I may watch it to see what I might do when I have the time to go there.
Consider fishing shows - going fishing takes a degree of prep time and travel time. I might not have the time to go fishing today, but I might have the time to watch a show about it to fix my Jones'in for fishing.
Consider golf shows - if I am a golfer and I come across a golf show, I might look out the window and say "I'll bet I could get a quick nine in before dinner", but then again, I might not.
Now, in light of those examples, consider a video game show. I am ALREADY in front of the TV - you know, where I would have to be to play a video game. Now, which am I more likely to do if I am a hard-core gamer - watch a TV show about gaming, or switch on my console AND ACTUALLY PLAY A GAME?
In short, who is likely to watch a show about video game play? Just how lazy do you have to be to watch (passively) a show about an activity that is itself fairly passive?
And as far as watching to pick up tips and tricks - there is a better solution for that for most gamers. I'll give you a hint - you're soaking in it!