Am I the only one to find the timing of the freak "dust storms" suspicious? It is obvious that Martians living in the neigbourhoods currently explored by the rovers would have a hard time launching to attend the Roswell UFO festival without being noticed. And you know some of these Martians value their privacy. I am sure these "dust storms" will clear out after the weekend, when everyone's back from the Festival.
While historically the reason behind the PAL/NTSC frame rate was the power supply frequency (50Hz/60Hz), it is not a problem with modern devices and certainly PAL devices all over the world display the same 25fps (with various methods depending on the device), not caring about the frequency of the power input - same with NTSC devices, or NTSC/PAL mode on the common multi-system devices. The grandparent post is also not to the point. It is not really the NTSC/PAL difference the problem any more. Many DVD players will play both formats fine, however there is region coding. It can be circumvented some times, but it is really there to have us buy products specific tou our region.
The simple math you ask is (0.05)^11, which is about a 1 out of 205 trillion probablility (or rather a huge improbability). To start having a more down-to-earth probability you would have to assume a huge 20% failure rate to bring the probablility down to 1 in 50 million. A 20% failure rate of course would not have gone by unnoticed and MS would certainly not have been able to dispute it. So, unless this guy is driving the Heart Of Gold, there is something else going on here.
It is much more complicated than that though... If I take various IQ tests, my score will vary up to 20 points between tests, which is the measurement error of the method. However, what the IQ test measures (and I hope I don't get flamed for this) is how well someone performs in IQ tests and the measurement has little correllation to what we would call "overall intelligence". For example I do really great on IQ tests, but that is just because I am good at that type of test. I have met people who do badly on these tests yet I would certainly not consider them "lower intelligence" than myself. Anyway, my point is that I never take any research that is based on IQ tests seriously. Many of our brain functions haven't even been explained yet, and you (rhetorical - not addressed to parent poster) are telling me we are in a position to objectively evaluate the overall performance of something that we don't really understand by such a simple test?
I really think you take the difference in the Japanese business ethics to the extreme. The company I work for (electronics sector, not gaming though) does deal with Japanese manufacturers (well known ones) and I do have a good perspective on some aspects of their business culture, however they certainly do care about profit. Granted, they are different than some other manufacturers who care ONLY about profit, and that makes them unique, but I really don't think they are the tradition-fixated caricatures you present them to be.
One interesting incident followed an extremely apologetic e-mail from a Japanese manager to our CEO (about a payment that was delaying due to external factors). Our CEO responded along the lines of "as long as they you doing what you can, it is fine by us", to which the Japanese manager wrote back to thank our CEO for his kindness than now "will allow him to sleep at night"! Anyway, it does not sound that impressive unless you read the actual emails (which, obviously and unfortunately, I cannot share).
Hahaha. All these years Mac users were made fun of the 1-button mouse and they would insist there is nothing wrong with it! They finally get a decent pointing device and they let years of supressed feelings come out at once: "HA! We have multiple buttons, suckers!". Thanks for the laughs man!
Oh, and all of my Windows and Suse machines are doing without any "infestations" thank you very much. Of course I only click on "nude.exe" attachments on the Suse machines;)
why doesn't MS just tell Square - Enix, hey give us the exclusive and we will pre-pay you for 10 million copies. That should help the XBOX sell a few units at the tough (for outsiders) Japanese market and help bury the PS3... A very good investment IMHO. And Square whether traditional or not, is still a business, so I can't see offers like that rejected "by principle".
The worse slashdot post in a while. Didn't the editors finish highschool? Ok, I do have a degree in Physics, but since highschool I have known that the deepest trench in the ocean is 11km deep, that we cannot photograph the earth in X-Rays (they don't penetrate the atmosphere, and the earth certainly does not emit them), that we cannot "analyze a picture in different wavelengths" (we can only take pictures in different wavelengths and THEN analyze them). Non-highschool level physics of course invalidates the rest of the points of this article. Why are we still discussing this?
Oh, and because the "multi million dollar" figure is too vague, let's say that for 2006 the top F1 teams each spent $200 million just for engines! An Indy Car engine costs usually less than $150k!
Ahem... The term "Grand Prix" traditionally refers to Formula One racing. No offence, but an Indy 500 car costing hundreds of thousands of dollars looks like a water bucket in comparison to the technologically advanced multi-million dollar F1s.
Welcome to our planet. While I have no idea if Paramount claims a copyright over the alphabet itself (that part of my post was for entertainment purposes), they certainly do claim that the Klingon language is copyrighted, or at least the Klingon dictionary. Most people would consider this absurd, but then again you never know how a judge would interpret things...
Hmm, strange. This seems to indicate that Transformers are related to Klingons? At least on the parent-mentioned website, after you log in, the buttons are marked with Klingon letters.
If they are not related to the Klingon homeworld, I do hope they at least have a license from Paramount (who are well known for their strict copyright policies).
If you go with Nokia and you care more about email than SMS, one other option is to just get the older 6680 (Europe) or 6681/6682 (US) and get EQ3 Email. With the purchase they send you for free a qwerty-like replacement keypad for the phone, which has a performance of about 3xT9 (and that for words that T9 knows - the email app's predictive engine is even better on non-dictionary words). So you end up with a device that has text entry capabilities close to a full qwerty device, but is smaller while having larger keys, and you can find a used one for around $100.
I am missing something in this story. They had a hotline that saved voicemail with timestamps and I guess CID, right? So, it had the message in question at timestamp 3:17, with no CID info (as the more thorough articles mention), right? Or they had a separate system to record CID's and one of those two systems was at DST and the other was not? I am not getting how the confusion could have happened. If the school phone system was not on DST, then both the kid's call and the bomb threat would have been registered at non-DST time, thus more than one hour apart. Anybody can explain here?
People already replied that MM is supported by Scumm, but you don't even need that if you can play DOTT. There is an arcade machine inside DOTT that you click on and play Maniac Mansion as a game-within-a-game. DOTT is the best of course!
FYI VirtualDub supports WDM directly since late 2004 ( your "recent" update;) ) and it is in fact the best capture program but for rare hardware configurations. The only reason Virtual VCR is on some of Doom9's guides, it is because they were written even before VirtualDub 1.6.2. I suggest you give VirtualDub another try.
He is asking about Linux, and Virtual VCR is DirectShow based. Well, in the end I would also recommend to use Windows for capturing, as much as I love my Suse for developing, my HTPC runs Windows for various reasons. Oh, if he did go to Windows, why Virtual VCR and not the best? I am talking about VirtualDub of course;) From then on (Huffyuv etc) you are right.
I find the result rather unsurprising. First of all I never understood why Star Wars is considered "Science Fiction". I don't think it should not be consider part of the Fantasy genre just because it is in space. Unless you consider LOTR as Sci-Fi as well, and then I would just have to say that we just dissagree in our interpretation of the term.
Anyway, Serenity was indeed the best RECENT sci-fi movie. I loved the series, my non-geek gf found it ok, but we both adored the movie. So, young people have probably missed many of the older genre greats, plus older people have a very recent impression of Serenity so a few might have voted it, but more importantly their votes were divided among the classics (would you vote "Blade Runner" or "2001" etc...). Hence the "unsurprising" comment.
Personaly, my favorite Sci-Fi of all time is ST: First Contact. But I am a die-hard Trekkie. That might also be the reason for my Star Wars rant: "So, you are into the Star Wars stuff." "No. Maybe you mean Star Trek." "Yeah, same thing."
I can't believe noone mentioned the Elite II: Frontier hyperjump bug! Ok, the game had many bugs and it was easy to get one of those infinite cash deals, but the best bug was definatelly the Hyperjump. So, you could only hyperjump to something like 20 Light Years (don't remember exactly, it's been years), but the distances were kept with a 16 bit variable apparently, so at multiples of 655.36 ly your jump was considered 0 ly length (so you could select something another 20 ly or so from that distance). The effect was that you could in the end go ANYWHERE in the galaxy with just two jumps if you were good at triangulation.
Then, I have to mention "Hangly Man". This cheapo Pacman knockoff would be just another arcade clone if it didn't have a bug that made it hard as hell. I don't remember exactly, but somewhere probably at the second round a bug would make the walls dissapear! No, you could not go through them, it was a display bug. So, the corridors that had dots were navigatable, for the rest you were in hard luck if you were chased by a ghost and not have photographic memory. Anyway, for years I thought that this thing was on purpose, until I also realized "Hangly Man" was really a Japanese attempt at "Hungry Man".
Did you ever read the grandparent post I was replying to? It was suggesting that whoever was responsible for the prior art can NOW many many years later file for a patent.
What you are saying is completely different and of course can be done in many cases. However, you cannot use your participation in an industry standards commitee to steer them towards adopting your technology without mentioning it is patent pending;)
1. Create/Invent something good 2. Convince people to use it, since it is a free/not patented alternative 3. Patent it when it has a decent adoption. 4. Profit!
So, in the real world there is no "3" in these profit schemes;)
Hmm, I have the oposite experience. I have been using inkjet since about 1996, when I got my first HP inkjet. I don't remember the model, I think it was 690 or something like that. It was a crappy printer and after a year or so it stopped being able to pull the paper from the tray. If I recall this was a common problem of the HP's of the era. Anyway, I got an Epson Color 400 to replace it (probably 1998). At first I would buy genuine ink, but it was kind of expensive so I switched to grey market and even refills (the latter were inferior though). I was a student, so I would print probably a paper every week, more during the finals and usually nothing during the summer. The printer never failed, simply when I moved (in 2003) I left it with my parents and got a used Epson C60 for $10 off a fleamarket. I buy ink from ebay (my last batch was 5-pack for less than $20) and it is 2007, I am no longer a student and print most stuff in my office, so I print something like an ebook per month. Maybe you didn't get good printers? For example Canons were known for being less expensive (esp. their ink), not for being good.
Well, I guess over 95% of users have sucky browsers, because it is the same for Firefox and IE... However Konqueror and Opera do indeed work with the Sony site.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one to find the timing of the freak "dust storms" suspicious? It is obvious that Martians living in the neigbourhoods currently explored by the rovers would have a hard time launching to attend the Roswell UFO festival without being noticed. And you know some of these Martians value their privacy. I am sure these "dust storms" will clear out after the weekend, when everyone's back from the Festival.
While historically the reason behind the PAL/NTSC frame rate was the power supply frequency (50Hz/60Hz), it is not a problem with modern devices and certainly PAL devices all over the world display the same 25fps (with various methods depending on the device), not caring about the frequency of the power input - same with NTSC devices, or NTSC/PAL mode on the common multi-system devices.
The grandparent post is also not to the point. It is not really the NTSC/PAL difference the problem any more. Many DVD players will play both formats fine, however there is region coding. It can be circumvented some times, but it is really there to have us buy products specific tou our region.
If they run "Vizi" through their Greek department, they will find out it means "boob" in Greek.
The simple math you ask is (0.05)^11, which is about a 1 out of 205 trillion probablility (or rather a huge improbability). To start having a more down-to-earth probability you would have to assume a huge 20% failure rate to bring the probablility down to 1 in 50 million. A 20% failure rate of course would not have gone by unnoticed and MS would certainly not have been able to dispute it.
So, unless this guy is driving the Heart Of Gold, there is something else going on here.
It is much more complicated than that though... If I take various IQ tests, my score will vary up to 20 points between tests, which is the measurement error of the method.
However, what the IQ test measures (and I hope I don't get flamed for this) is how well someone performs in IQ tests and the measurement has little correllation to what we would call "overall intelligence". For example I do really great on IQ tests, but that is just because I am good at that type of test. I have met people who do badly on these tests yet I would certainly not consider them "lower intelligence" than myself.
Anyway, my point is that I never take any research that is based on IQ tests seriously. Many of our brain functions haven't even been explained yet, and you (rhetorical - not addressed to parent poster) are telling me we are in a position to objectively evaluate the overall performance of something that we don't really understand by such a simple test?
I really think you take the difference in the Japanese business ethics to the extreme. The company I work for (electronics sector, not gaming though) does deal with Japanese manufacturers (well known ones) and I do have a good perspective on some aspects of their business culture, however they certainly do care about profit. Granted, they are different than some other manufacturers who care ONLY about profit, and that makes them unique, but I really don't think they are the tradition-fixated caricatures you present them to be.
One interesting incident followed an extremely apologetic e-mail from a Japanese manager to our CEO (about a payment that was delaying due to external factors). Our CEO responded along the lines of "as long as they you doing what you can, it is fine by us", to which the Japanese manager wrote back to thank our CEO for his kindness than now "will allow him to sleep at night"! Anyway, it does not sound that impressive unless you read the actual emails (which, obviously and unfortunately, I cannot share).
If this is accurate: http://www.cinemablend.com/features/Uwe-Boll-Money -For-Nothing-209.html, then you have your answer.
Hahaha. All these years Mac users were made fun of the 1-button mouse and they would insist there is nothing wrong with it! They finally get a decent pointing device and they let years of supressed feelings come out at once: "HA! We have multiple buttons, suckers!".
;)
Thanks for the laughs man!
Oh, and all of my Windows and Suse machines are doing without any "infestations" thank you very much. Of course I only click on "nude.exe" attachments on the Suse machines
why doesn't MS just tell Square - Enix, hey give us the exclusive and we will pre-pay you for 10 million copies. That should help the XBOX sell a few units at the tough (for outsiders) Japanese market and help bury the PS3... A very good investment IMHO.
And Square whether traditional or not, is still a business, so I can't see offers like that rejected "by principle".
The worse slashdot post in a while. Didn't the editors finish highschool? Ok, I do have a degree in Physics, but since highschool I have known that the deepest trench in the ocean is 11km deep, that we cannot photograph the earth in X-Rays (they don't penetrate the atmosphere, and the earth certainly does not emit them), that we cannot "analyze a picture in different wavelengths" (we can only take pictures in different wavelengths and THEN analyze them).
Non-highschool level physics of course invalidates the rest of the points of this article. Why are we still discussing this?
Oh, and because the "multi million dollar" figure is too vague, let's say that for 2006 the top F1 teams each spent $200 million just for engines! An Indy Car engine costs usually less than $150k!
Ahem... The term "Grand Prix" traditionally refers to Formula One racing. No offence, but an Indy 500 car costing hundreds of thousands of dollars looks like a water bucket in comparison to the technologically advanced multi-million dollar F1s.
Welcome to our planet.
While I have no idea if Paramount claims a copyright over the alphabet itself (that part of my post was for entertainment purposes), they certainly do claim that the Klingon language is copyrighted, or at least the Klingon dictionary. Most people would consider this absurd, but then again you never know how a judge would interpret things...
Hmm, strange. This seems to indicate that Transformers are related to Klingons? At least on the parent-mentioned website, after you log in, the buttons are marked with Klingon letters.
If they are not related to the Klingon homeworld, I do hope they at least have a license from Paramount (who are well known for their strict copyright policies).
If you go with Nokia and you care more about email than SMS, one other option is to just get the older 6680 (Europe) or 6681/6682 (US) and get EQ3 Email. With the purchase they send you for free a qwerty-like replacement keypad for the phone, which has a performance of about 3xT9 (and that for words that T9 knows - the email app's predictive engine is even better on non-dictionary words). So you end up with a device that has text entry capabilities close to a full qwerty device, but is smaller while having larger keys, and you can find a used one for around $100.
I am missing something in this story. They had a hotline that saved voicemail with timestamps and I guess CID, right? So, it had the message in question at timestamp 3:17, with no CID info (as the more thorough articles mention), right? Or they had a separate system to record CID's and one of those two systems was at DST and the other was not?
I am not getting how the confusion could have happened. If the school phone system was not on DST, then both the kid's call and the bomb threat would have been registered at non-DST time, thus more than one hour apart.
Anybody can explain here?
People already replied that MM is supported by Scumm, but you don't even need that if you can play DOTT. There is an arcade machine inside DOTT that you click on and play Maniac Mansion as a game-within-a-game.
DOTT is the best of course!
FYI VirtualDub supports WDM directly since late 2004 ( your "recent" update ;) ) and it is in fact the best capture program but for rare hardware configurations. The only reason Virtual VCR is on some of Doom9's guides, it is because they were written even before VirtualDub 1.6.2. I suggest you give VirtualDub another try.
He is asking about Linux, and Virtual VCR is DirectShow based. ;) From then on (Huffyuv etc) you are right.
Well, in the end I would also recommend to use Windows for capturing, as much as I love my Suse for developing, my HTPC runs Windows for various reasons.
Oh, if he did go to Windows, why Virtual VCR and not the best? I am talking about VirtualDub of course
I find the result rather unsurprising. First of all I never understood why Star Wars is considered "Science Fiction". I don't think it should not be consider part of the Fantasy genre just because it is in space. Unless you consider LOTR as Sci-Fi as well, and then I would just have to say that we just dissagree in our interpretation of the term.
Anyway, Serenity was indeed the best RECENT sci-fi movie. I loved the series, my non-geek gf found it ok, but we both adored the movie. So, young people have probably missed many of the older genre greats, plus older people have a very recent impression of Serenity so a few might have voted it, but more importantly their votes were divided among the classics (would you vote "Blade Runner" or "2001" etc...). Hence the "unsurprising" comment.
Personaly, my favorite Sci-Fi of all time is ST: First Contact. But I am a die-hard Trekkie. That might also be the reason for my Star Wars rant: "So, you are into the Star Wars stuff." "No. Maybe you mean Star Trek." "Yeah, same thing."
I can't believe noone mentioned the Elite II: Frontier hyperjump bug! Ok, the game had many bugs and it was easy to get one of those infinite cash deals, but the best bug was definatelly the Hyperjump. So, you could only hyperjump to something like 20 Light Years (don't remember exactly, it's been years), but the distances were kept with a 16 bit variable apparently, so at multiples of 655.36 ly your jump was considered 0 ly length (so you could select something another 20 ly or so from that distance). The effect was that you could in the end go ANYWHERE in the galaxy with just two jumps if you were good at triangulation.
Then, I have to mention "Hangly Man". This cheapo Pacman knockoff would be just another arcade clone if it didn't have a bug that made it hard as hell. I don't remember exactly, but somewhere probably at the second round a bug would make the walls dissapear! No, you could not go through them, it was a display bug. So, the corridors that had dots were navigatable, for the rest you were in hard luck if you were chased by a ghost and not have photographic memory. Anyway, for years I thought that this thing was on purpose, until I also realized "Hangly Man" was really a Japanese attempt at "Hungry Man".
Did you ever read the grandparent post I was replying to? It was suggesting that whoever was responsible for the prior art can NOW many many years later file for a patent.
;)
What you are saying is completely different and of course can be done in many cases. However, you cannot use your participation in an industry standards commitee to steer them towards adopting your technology without mentioning it is patent pending
Nope you cannot do that. Otherwise:
;)
1. Create/Invent something good
2. Convince people to use it, since it is a free/not patented alternative
3. Patent it when it has a decent adoption.
4. Profit!
So, in the real world there is no "3" in these profit schemes
Hmm, I have the oposite experience. I have been using inkjet since about 1996, when I got my first HP inkjet. I don't remember the model, I think it was 690 or something like that. It was a crappy printer and after a year or so it stopped being able to pull the paper from the tray. If I recall this was a common problem of the HP's of the era. Anyway, I got an Epson Color 400 to replace it (probably 1998). At first I would buy genuine ink, but it was kind of expensive so I switched to grey market and even refills (the latter were inferior though). I was a student, so I would print probably a paper every week, more during the finals and usually nothing during the summer. The printer never failed, simply when I moved (in 2003) I left it with my parents and got a used Epson C60 for $10 off a fleamarket. I buy ink from ebay (my last batch was 5-pack for less than $20) and it is 2007, I am no longer a student and print most stuff in my office, so I print something like an ebook per month. Maybe you didn't get good printers? For example Canons were known for being less expensive (esp. their ink), not for being good.
Well, I guess over 95% of users have sucky browsers, because it is the same for Firefox and IE... However Konqueror and Opera do indeed work with the Sony site.