I pay the same number in dollars for 10 Megs! And my ISP doesn't even start thinking about bitching about usage until I hit 100 Gigs or thereabouts in a given month.
Who is your ISP? Surely it can't be one of the major U.S. cable companies (AT&T, Optimum Online, Cox, etc.)?
I, like a significant percentage of my fellow citizens, do not support Bush, his administration, nor the neo-con obsession with war-as-a-solution-to-everything.
You sound like a bigot and I resent your smug stereotyping of Americans.
Maybe they could have a explorer or survey team with only a few weapons stumble onto an alien nest world.
I agree the "endless shooting" stuff gets boring very fast, as you say, but your alternate idea has also been done to death: small group of plucky explorers trapped against overwhelming odds, outnumbered and outgunned, slowly getting picked off one by one while crawling around in the dark, until only the last 1 or 2 makes it back to the escape ship alive. Yawn!
Someone seriously needs to come up with a fresh approach to this kind of movie.
Reminds me of that somewhat bizarre subplot in Vinge's latest novel "Rainbow's End" where there was a big project to digitize all the university libraries, and some guy came up with the fastest way to do it: just throw all the books into a giant shredder, and then gave lots of cameras taking pictures of every last bit from every andle as it comes blowing out the other end...then re-assemble it all in a computer.
Seemed a little far-fetched to me, even for Vinge.
Why is everyone dissing cutscenes? I'm not a huge gamer but I remember with the old Blizzard RTS games like Warcraft and Starcraft, I thought the pre-rendered CGI cut scenes were rippin' good fun, made for a nice break between the action and a cool "reward" for finishing a level. Didn't detract from the game play at all, at least not for me.
So what do I do if I don't want the clutter? Throw them all into a landfill?
You're welcome to store them at my place. Let me know and I'll send you my shipping address. Also if you lose your HD or something you can come by and listen to them any time you like.
You're 3 loops deep in a function and encounter an unrecoverable error... are you going to raise the exception there, or...what? goto out of the loop and then raise?
I think you need to re-evaluate your heavy dependence on goto's. You seem to be using them as a crutch rather than as a tool.
I agree that goto's are very occasionally useful, in certain rare cases. Your contrived example is definitely not one of them. Many posters have already demonstrated how your same snippet could be written more elegantly without goto's. If a junior programmer working for me wrote the above code, I would give him a gentle lecture. If an experienced coder working for me wrote that code, I would demand an immediate explanation, and it had better be a damned good one.
The rare case where a goto is useful is when (in C only, of course, where you don't have the luxury of exceptions) you need to escape from a deeply nested block due to an unexpected error. Handling such a case w/o goto's can sometimes require gunking up the whole series of nested loops with extra conditions. So that is the one case where I would maybe accept the sacrifice of a goto in the name of overall code cleanliness.
Science fiction is a wonderful thing to contemplate but keep your pants on. No such mission is feasible within the lifetime of anyone on this planet.
Amen to that. Sending even a tiny probe, let alone a ship big enough to hold people, requires technology, not to mention energy expenditures, that is light years (pardon the expression) beyond anything we have or even think we might have in the next 100 years. Ain't gonna happen.
Put another way, it would be easier to send a million people to Mars and build them big Martian cities to live in than it would be to send a single probe to a star 20 light years away.
My HTPC is a Shuttle XPC running plain ol' Windows XP with a GeForce 6600GT video card, connected to an Optoma HD70 front projector, and yes it is working without issue. I've never seen nor heard of the red snow problem you are describing...perhaps a quick search at avsforum.com in the HTPC forum, or even a post, would help? There are a lot of very knowledgeable people in that forum.
I have a front projector setup in my home theater room, driven by a HTPC. I've been using a 30 foot VGA cable for years. Recently I got a new 720p projector with both VGA and HDMI inputs, so after a while I bought a 30 foot DVI->HDMI cable (video card has the typical 1 VGA and 1 DVI output) and switched to that. I honestly could not tell any difference in the image quality.
I didn't spend big bucks on cables either...both cables were in the $30-$50 range. The image looks great in both cases.
Another satisfied Kill-A-Watt owner here. The above mentioned limitations haven't really bothered me. So far I've used it to learn the following things:
All the devices in my home office together are costing me about $35/month to run
Just running the World Community Grid Agent (or any other distributed client that maxes out the CPU) causes my 2 PCs to use an extra 50 watts/hour each...which at our very high electricity rates costs me an extra $12/month
The dehumidifier we have in the basement is a vicious power sucking beast.
It would be very interesting to be able to send a mission to a planet like this some day and find out a little more about what factors possibly came together to create something with such a low density.
Dude, if we ever have the ability to send missions that far, I say F the puffed up cork planets and head straight for the earth-like ones, that's where the action is.
In addition to what you said, it's also safer. Unlike with the P2P pirate networks, (presumably) the RIAA cannot find you through allofmp3.com and sue you for copyright infringement.
Well, for what it's worth to anyone, here is my 2 cents.
2 years ago I set up my first a home theater, with a front DLP projector and the standard 5.1 speaker setup. The only hardware driving it is a high-end HTPC and a surround receiver. We use this setup to watch DVDs and they look great. Well, at first they looked great, because I was used to watching them on a standard def TV before that. The 96" diagonal image helps, too.
Then maybe a year or so ago I downloaded my first HD clip from the internet. I was blown away. The quality of a true HD broadcast is immediately, obviously superior to a DVD, even on my 1024x768 which can't even do native 720p. My first thought was...when can we get movies in this format? (Yes I know I can get them on some HD cable/satellite channels, but I refuse to pay $60/month for that.) Then I heard about the upcoming HD DVD formats and said good, that makes sense, those of us with HD or similar displays need this to get the full potential out of our systems.
The June issue of Sound & Vision (a magazine whose opinion I trust) has a detailed review of Toshiba's first HD DVD player. They declare in no uncertain terms that the image quality of the new HD DVDs blows DVDs out of the water. BUT - and here is the catch I think - to get that quality, you must hook the player up to a native 1080 display. They hooked the player up to a 720p display, and in that case they said "the image could easily be mistaken for a regular DVD, or worse." This is because the onboard scalers in the first generation players are crap. To get good quality at 720p out of a HD DVD right now, you must use a quality outboard scaler. I think that issue right there explains why so many people are puzzled when they see HD DVD for the first time, because it really doesn't look any better than DVD unless the display is 1080p, which it usually isn't.
So now I'm thinking that hopefully, the hardware manufacturers will wise up and include much improved scalers for downconverting to 720p in the second generation players. Then I think more people will begin to appreciate what HD DVD has to offer.
So my adoption of HD DVD is still a ways off...although I am intrigued by the fact that Netflix is already offering movies in both HD DVD and Blue Ray format. I'm much more interested in being able to rent new movies in HD than repurchasing the old ones that I already bought on DVD. If I could buy a single player now that could play both HD DVD and Blue Ray, and which had a quality scalar in it so that the movies look good on my projector, I would be in all the way. Better yet, if I could just buy a HD DVD/Blue Ray combo drive for my HTPC that would play movies, it would be a done deal.
I think you misunderstand the court system. You can accuse anybody of anything.
Yes, of course. I mispoke. What I meant by "legally accused" is that a female employee could not bring a harassment suit against a company because one co-worker asked her out one time, and win, because no laws will have been broken. If that's all that really happened, then to win the suit, she would have to lie or portray the incident in some other light, and also somehow falsify evidence to prove that genuine harassment took place, and that the company allowed it to continue.
If it's really true in many work places today that simply asking someone out, or being accused with no evidence is enough to get you fired, then I agree something has gone horribly wrong. I've never worked at a company like that so it's still hard to imagine.
Meanwhile, once I'm convinced that genuine instances of real harassment are not still routinely occurring out there, I'll feel more outraged about this "reverse discrimination."
Companies, especially in America, are overly concerned with sexual harassment.
I don't know about overly, but they are definitely concerned about it. And for good reason: the punitive legal damages for allowing an abusive situation to persist are huge and getting huger, and rightly so. It is a case where the legal system is actually working, IMO. This situation only exists in the first place, not because of some irrational paranoia fueled by crazy, vindictive women, but because the history of unbelievably appalling behavior (typically by male supervisors) in the work place is long and disgraceful.
I guess you all work for different companies than I do. Every company I ever worked for had a clear, no-nonsense policy on sexual harassment. Despite being a typically male dominated work environment, the male employees and female employees got along fine, socialized after work, even dated. Everyone respected each other as professionals. No one was running off to HR at the slightest glance or getting "blacklisted" by false accusations.
I think I'm missing something here. How would 'Hi, we're all heading off to the pub now, do you want to join us?' be construed as sexual harassment?
I totally agree. This is absurd. You cannot (legally) be accused of sexual harassment for asking a co-worker out, whether its with a group or for a private date. The Harassment doesn't begin until he/she says no and you keep asking anyway, or there is some other extenuating circumstance.
I think the GP and his co-workers need to review the materials they were given at their company's sexual harassment policy review meeting. Or maybe his company hasn't ever had such a meeting, which might explain their confusion on the matter.
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Who is your ISP? Surely it can't be one of the major U.S. cable companies (AT&T, Optimum Online, Cox, etc.)?
Coincidence? I think not.
I know where Estonia is.
I, like a significant percentage of my fellow citizens, do not support Bush, his administration, nor the neo-con obsession with war-as-a-solution-to-everything.
You sound like a bigot and I resent your smug stereotyping of Americans.
Hey, is that a desktop in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
I agree the "endless shooting" stuff gets boring very fast, as you say, but your alternate idea has also been done to death: small group of plucky explorers trapped against overwhelming odds, outnumbered and outgunned, slowly getting picked off one by one while crawling around in the dark, until only the last 1 or 2 makes it back to the escape ship alive. Yawn!
Someone seriously needs to come up with a fresh approach to this kind of movie.
Seemed a little far-fetched to me, even for Vinge.
Hey, that looks exactly like a screenshot from Sim City when you've zoned too much industrial in one place. You should put in some more parks.
Why is everyone dissing cutscenes? I'm not a huge gamer but I remember with the old Blizzard RTS games like Warcraft and Starcraft, I thought the pre-rendered CGI cut scenes were rippin' good fun, made for a nice break between the action and a cool "reward" for finishing a level. Didn't detract from the game play at all, at least not for me.
You're welcome to store them at my place. Let me know and I'll send you my shipping address. Also if you lose your HD or something you can come by and listen to them any time you like.
You're 3 loops deep in a function and encounter an unrecoverable error... are you going to raise the exception there, or...what? goto out of the loop and then raise?
I think you need to re-evaluate your heavy dependence on goto's. You seem to be using them as a crutch rather than as a tool.
I agree that goto's are very occasionally useful, in certain rare cases. Your contrived example is definitely not one of them. Many posters have already demonstrated how your same snippet could be written more elegantly without goto's. If a junior programmer working for me wrote the above code, I would give him a gentle lecture. If an experienced coder working for me wrote that code, I would demand an immediate explanation, and it had better be a damned good one.
The rare case where a goto is useful is when (in C only, of course, where you don't have the luxury of exceptions) you need to escape from a deeply nested block due to an unexpected error. Handling such a case w/o goto's can sometimes require gunking up the whole series of nested loops with extra conditions. So that is the one case where I would maybe accept the sacrifice of a goto in the name of overall code cleanliness.
Why? IANAL but it sounds like good advice to me. The DMCA is clearly worded on this point and is hopelessly biased in favor of the rightsholders.
Until the DMCA gets changed and/or revoked, anyone who posts this kind of information on their web site is in serious legal danger.
Amen to that. Sending even a tiny probe, let alone a ship big enough to hold people, requires technology, not to mention energy expenditures, that is light years (pardon the expression) beyond anything we have or even think we might have in the next 100 years. Ain't gonna happen.
Put another way, it would be easier to send a million people to Mars and build them big Martian cities to live in than it would be to send a single probe to a star 20 light years away.
My HTPC is a Shuttle XPC running plain ol' Windows XP with a GeForce 6600GT video card, connected to an Optoma HD70 front projector, and yes it is working without issue. I've never seen nor heard of the red snow problem you are describing...perhaps a quick search at avsforum.com in the HTPC forum, or even a post, would help? There are a lot of very knowledgeable people in that forum.
I didn't spend big bucks on cables either...both cables were in the $30-$50 range. The image looks great in both cases.
Don't you mean maniacal directors?
That's an interesting euphemism for "customers".
Dude, if we ever have the ability to send missions that far, I say F the puffed up cork planets and head straight for the earth-like ones, that's where the action is.
In addition to what you said, it's also safer. Unlike with the P2P pirate networks, (presumably) the RIAA cannot find you through allofmp3.com and sue you for copyright infringement.
2 years ago I set up my first a home theater, with a front DLP projector and the standard 5.1 speaker setup. The only hardware driving it is a high-end HTPC and a surround receiver. We use this setup to watch DVDs and they look great. Well, at first they looked great, because I was used to watching them on a standard def TV before that. The 96" diagonal image helps, too.
Then maybe a year or so ago I downloaded my first HD clip from the internet. I was blown away. The quality of a true HD broadcast is immediately, obviously superior to a DVD, even on my 1024x768 which can't even do native 720p. My first thought was...when can we get movies in this format? (Yes I know I can get them on some HD cable/satellite channels, but I refuse to pay $60/month for that.) Then I heard about the upcoming HD DVD formats and said good, that makes sense, those of us with HD or similar displays need this to get the full potential out of our systems.
The June issue of Sound & Vision (a magazine whose opinion I trust) has a detailed review of Toshiba's first HD DVD player. They declare in no uncertain terms that the image quality of the new HD DVDs blows DVDs out of the water. BUT - and here is the catch I think - to get that quality, you must hook the player up to a native 1080 display. They hooked the player up to a 720p display, and in that case they said "the image could easily be mistaken for a regular DVD, or worse." This is because the onboard scalers in the first generation players are crap. To get good quality at 720p out of a HD DVD right now, you must use a quality outboard scaler. I think that issue right there explains why so many people are puzzled when they see HD DVD for the first time, because it really doesn't look any better than DVD unless the display is 1080p, which it usually isn't.
So now I'm thinking that hopefully, the hardware manufacturers will wise up and include much improved scalers for downconverting to 720p in the second generation players. Then I think more people will begin to appreciate what HD DVD has to offer.
So my adoption of HD DVD is still a ways off...although I am intrigued by the fact that Netflix is already offering movies in both HD DVD and Blue Ray format. I'm much more interested in being able to rent new movies in HD than repurchasing the old ones that I already bought on DVD. If I could buy a single player now that could play both HD DVD and Blue Ray, and which had a quality scalar in it so that the movies look good on my projector, I would be in all the way. Better yet, if I could just buy a HD DVD/Blue Ray combo drive for my HTPC that would play movies, it would be a done deal.
Yes, of course. I mispoke. What I meant by "legally accused" is that a female employee could not bring a harassment suit against a company because one co-worker asked her out one time, and win, because no laws will have been broken. If that's all that really happened, then to win the suit, she would have to lie or portray the incident in some other light, and also somehow falsify evidence to prove that genuine harassment took place, and that the company allowed it to continue.
If it's really true in many work places today that simply asking someone out, or being accused with no evidence is enough to get you fired, then I agree something has gone horribly wrong. I've never worked at a company like that so it's still hard to imagine.
Meanwhile, once I'm convinced that genuine instances of real harassment are not still routinely occurring out there, I'll feel more outraged about this "reverse discrimination."
I don't know about overly, but they are definitely concerned about it. And for good reason: the punitive legal damages for allowing an abusive situation to persist are huge and getting huger, and rightly so. It is a case where the legal system is actually working, IMO. This situation only exists in the first place, not because of some irrational paranoia fueled by crazy, vindictive women, but because the history of unbelievably appalling behavior (typically by male supervisors) in the work place is long and disgraceful.
I guess you all work for different companies than I do. Every company I ever worked for had a clear, no-nonsense policy on sexual harassment. Despite being a typically male dominated work environment, the male employees and female employees got along fine, socialized after work, even dated. Everyone respected each other as professionals. No one was running off to HR at the slightest glance or getting "blacklisted" by false accusations.
I totally agree. This is absurd. You cannot (legally) be accused of sexual harassment for asking a co-worker out, whether its with a group or for a private date. The Harassment doesn't begin until he/she says no and you keep asking anyway, or there is some other extenuating circumstance.
I think the GP and his co-workers need to review the materials they were given at their company's sexual harassment policy review meeting. Or maybe his company hasn't ever had such a meeting, which might explain their confusion on the matter.
Great idea! Let's rally the troops! Online petitions to save cancelled sci-fi TV shows have worked so well in the past.
BTW, anyone have torrents for last week's episodes of Farscape and Enterprise?